interesting - enough so, that I listened to four more interviews ... I have never been convinced that anyone has successfully Mastered MEST when it is evident that the majority of us can't master our own emotions ... and spend most of our time in the Ego's playground of the Past - rewriting it.

it does make me wonder, what could happen, between now and the election, that would inspire 50+% of the American voters, to write in his name - add that to the fact that he is is running Independent on the "truther" party ... I do believe that any thing is possible, just can't envision that happening - any time soon and I like all his "talking points" ... they seem very reasonable - and progressive... but will take a while to manifest in the Genetic Mind

which reminds me, that this is why the WMMs are here now ... to help us get ready, to realize our full potential - as time travelers

_________________"...to know this information and then remain passive—a pure observer—is a programmed response, and that is not an answer to how do I best serve truth? It is a denial of truth.” 5th Interview

Ya, I know what you're saying. This American election seems so bizarre that I think anything can happen. We can only hope! I really pity you if Trump gets in but then I pity you too if Hiliary does. They seem so desperate and in a hurry. I don't think all is well on the OWO front as it seems to be more and more unravelling and running away from them. They are waaaay behind schedule. For some reason I think the second coming is now delayed indefinitely. It must be all those glitches in the fabric of time. Here in Canada we have Trudeau who is an unknown but seems to be toeing the ally to America line. He likes to come across as a champion of common people having been a high school teacher(I think), but he comes from a very moneyed background his French relatives made a fortune in France which his father inherited and so did Justin from his father. Sinclair is the maternal background name so his bloodlines are elite bloodlines. He is also Jesuit trained like his father was and so many of the elite are. He seems to be as far removed from most people in that sense as the elite who use their wealth as a fortress, not caring about those not of financial or power gain interest to them. I could be wrong about Justin and would be delighted if proven so. Alfred does say that if not this election then in 2020 for Basiago. We'll see, at the rate things are happening now it could be very very different come 2020, maybe even more bizarre than this election.

Google is sooo much like Microsoft if not for arrogance alone. They are just as power hungry if not even more so. Microsoft attempted to monopolize selling computer software, the Microsoft Windows OS and Google is attempting the same with their search engine in controlling what info from the internet it gives you according to how much Google has analyzed you as you surf the web. They are everywhere on the web tracking you. I almost never use Google as a search engine and still can see how much they try tracking me. I have a destruct cookie add-on on my browser which shows me everyone who tracks. Google likes to tell you what you are interested in according to all the info they have picked up on you from tracking you. They are like a monopoly for how big they have gotten and so far removed from what real people want. They are tailored to those who use Google according to what Google thinks is best for you. I make my own choices for my own good thank you. It doesn't help that Darpa is an integral part of Google so you know they do work with the NSA as well. Kurt Kurzweil, top engineer for Google, with his book, The Singularity is Near, and his Transhumanist agenda means to carry that out and from how Google acts with real people, especially some of the most unfortunate, it seems they have already succeeded with their cross of machine components with humans if not their programmed minds alone displaying this. Those quotes by the founders of Google,(Larry Page and Sergey Brin) in the beginning of this article are really meant to be sarcastic. That's because they are lies. (I posted an article about Kurt Kurzweil and his Transhumanist agenda earlier on my Transhumanist thread and his detractors point out the glaring flaws in his scheme from a scientific point of view.)

"We got geeks": Inside Google's ugly war against the homeless in LA

“No I don’t always harass the press. I only do it when the press harass us”

“We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources . . . and have a much more positive impact on the world.”

—Larry Page

“In terms of being remembered, I think I want to make the world a better place.”

—Sergey Brin

VENICE BEACH, CA — How does Google, one of the most cash-rich and innovative companies in the world, propose to deal with the issue of homelessness in America? What's its 21st century, New Economy solution to disrupt and solve this difficult socio-economic problem once and for all?

In Los Angeles, the company's fix is brilliantly simple: Hire private security to harass and push the homeless out of sight, and then make sure that the smelly bastards and their tents and carts never come back.

I have seen this solution in action myself. I live just around the corner from Google’s new campus in Venice, LA — two big properties located right off the beach, smack in the middle of Venice's tiny Skid Row. Los Angeles is in the grips of a homeless population explosion, with an increase of 12 percent just in the last year. And this small two-square-block area used to be one of the last places where homeless people were somewhat tolerated around these parts.

But not any more — not after Google decided to claim sidewalks for itself and cranked up aggressive security patrols in order to drive away the local homeless population.

"Me and my girlfriend got maced by doing nothing,” a man named "Cory" [not his real name] tells me. He has steely blue eyes and shaggy hair, and looks more like an aging surfer than someone who sleeps rough on the streets. He recounts a recent experience he claims to have had with a Google security guard while sitting on a public sidewalk near the company's campus.

“He wanted us to leave. I had water in both hands so I couldn’t attack. And we’re like, 'what the [Censored], man?' And he was just like, pshhhhh,” he continues, reenacting the hissing sound of the mace spray can and explaining that they were given no time to leave or react in any way. "My girlfriend didn’t want to be there. Actually she was terrified of them. Every time Google security came, she said ‘we gotta go, we gotta go.’ We’re not allowed to be on public sidewalks, even though we’re the public.”

I'm talking to him on a sidewalk in the shade of a small tree on 3rd Avenue, which runs between a self-storage business and the backside of Google’s newest property, a giant warehouse that’s currently being remodeled into an expansive new Google office space.

I look up and down the street. It's around 10 am and a dozen people are still hanging around — but most have split for the day, leaving their bedding and belongings neatly stacked up in bundles against sides of the sidewalk.

Talk to the people here, and you’ll hear similar tales of harassment and intimidation at the hands of Google security guards — tactics they say are designed to make their homeless existence even harder and more painful than it already is.

* * * *

"We running a business here. Can't have homeless people out here like that. We got geeks. They're scaring folks.”

That's what I was told — firsthand, no hearsay — by a Google security guard who was patrolling the perimeter. It was a chilly Los Angeles evening in mid-February, and the security guard wore a fleece and baseball cap emblazoned with the cheery Google logo. A Google employee badge dangled at his belt.

The reason he was speaking so freely is that I hadn't mentioned I was a member of the press — largely because, that evening at least, I wasn't. I was just another Venice area local, on my way home from the gym, who had stopped to chat to the guard. I certainly hadn't expected him to so candidly explain how Google employees — and especially Google executives — were freaked out by the homeless people outside its walls. So freaked out that he was hired on as part of a beefed up security presence aimed at clearing the public street that bisects Google’s two properties of any homeless presence.

The guard pointed at a Google building on the corner of Hampton Drive and Rose Avenue: "This building right here is for all the engineers. Everyone in there makes over $1 million. They got their own barbershop right there. They take care of them. You can't have all these tents here," he said, sweeping his arm in an arc, pointing to the parts of the street he considered to be off-limits to homeless people — day or night.

Google's no homeless on the sidewalk policy may make sense for the company. The catch is that the sidewalks don't belong to Google: they're public property, and a federal court had mandated that Los Angeles allow people to sleep there between the hours of 9 pm and 6 am, as long as they leave a little room for foot traffic and don’t block any doors or driveways. This restriction is part of a settlement that has been in place since 2007, and neither police nor a corporate giant like Google has the legal right to determine who can or cannot sleep on any given chunk of sidewalk in LA.

But, lawful or not, Google’s tactics are working. Before the company moved into the neighborhood, the stretch of sidewalk between its two buildings had always had a homeless presence. The number of people sleeping there was always in flux. Sometimes there were just one or two, other times a dozen. Some would sleep in their cars; others would park their RVs for days at a time. Sometimes people would roll out their sleeping bags or tents for the night, and those with neither would sleep with nothing but a blanket and few cardboard boxes spread out to cushion the hard and cold concrete. Usually, they’d pack up during the day and leave their bedding and gear stacked against a wall or fence.

But on the night I stopped to speak to the guard, there was barely a homeless person or RV or van in sight. The sidewalk was swept clean, illuminated by rows of powerful new LED lights installed by Google. A few late-working Google employees, who increasingly use this stretch of sidewalk to go between the company's two properties on either side of the street, walked up and down without a care in the world.

The security guard was clearly pleased with the results. This was, after all, what he and his colleagues were hired to do.

The homeless were out of sight and out of mind. But they weren't gone. Just dispersed — dispersed and bitter.

Some of the people had scattered, others had migrated over a block down to the last little sliver of skid row left. That's where I found them when I went back several months later — identifying myself as a journalist this time, and accompanied by filmmaker Rowan Wernham — to try to understand the relationship between Google and its homeless neighbors.

The homeless people we met weren't crazy or dirty or violent. Some just wanted to be left alone. Others had been brutalized by the recession and the disastrous American economy. Many were recently homeless and had the bottom fall out by the foreclosures and layoffs triggered by the crash of 2008.

"It looks horrible, but it's not as bad as it looks — not if you know people here," says "Cory." "It's like family, I've been here for two years. If I need something I'll have it in a couple of hours. Like if someone steals my sleeping bag. I need that. That's life. But somebody will help me here. We're a tribe. Everyone knows each other here."

They talk about the ineffectualness of Los Angeles’ current homeless programs of alleviating their core problem: housing. They complain bitterly about constant police harassment — something they say only got worse after Google moved into the neighborhood a few years ago. Many are angry and seething with resentment at Google’s tactics, which they believe are designed to push them out of the area for good.

Google comes to Venice

Google first opened up an office in Venice Beach in late 2011. It then snapped up leases on surrounding properties, allowing it to sprawl over nearly two square blocks of prime real estate in one of the best neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

On paper, Google’s new digs — intended to house a portion of its Google+, YouTube advertising, and Chrome Book divisions — seemed picture perfect. The property is just a few minutes by foot from a gorgeous never-ending white sand beach. It's surrounded by all sorts of bars, cafes, and restaurants and is just around the corner from Abbot Kinney — named by GQ as the "Coolest Block in America." Google employees can surf, skate, bike, play volleyball, see shows, check out art galleries or visit pot dispensaries — all within a few square blocks of their office.

But there was one bug that needed to be fixed: the homeless. Google’s new property sat smack in the middle of Venice’s Skid Row — a few square blocks still zoned for light industry and home to a sizable homeless encampment.

At first, Google didn’t seem to mind. The company initially operated only one property — the famous Frank Gehry “Binoculars Building.” Like other Google locations, it is a self-contained ecosystem; an office bio-dome: Delicious food service, snacks, coffee, surfboards, games, a top-of-the-line gym, a climbing wall, a cool roof deck, periodic food truck lunch parties, and an underground gated parking lot. With so much stuff to do inside, Googlers rarely ventured outside and didn’t have to see or interact with the homeless population that was camped out just beyond its walls.

But this live-and-let-live attitude changed after Google leased a second giant property — a series of warehouse compounds that take up almost an entire block and which used to belong to James Cameron’s Digital Domain special effects company. This new compound is located on the other side of the street from the Binoculars Buildings. For the first time, Google employees needed to venture outside of their compound to cross the street. As foot traffic between the two properties increased, Google employees suddenly had to navigate a terrain of impoverished people living right under their windows, with nothing but tents and sleeping bags.

That’s when I, and other Venice locals, noticed the hammer coming down.

I watched as Google increased its security presence and aggressive patrol tactics. Bright lights were installed to illuminate the sidewalks at night. LAPD cruisers began appearing with more frequency. Altercations between the local homeless and Google security guards increased as well. One day, I saw a Google employee accompanied by a security guard dumping what appeared to be belongings left behind by homeless people into a giant trash bin on wheels.

“Google? Google is a fucking [Censored]. Straight up,” says "Jesse," a wiry man with a buzzcut and a black shirt with "It's the People" written on the front. He is camped behind Google’s second property and recycles cans and assembles bikes from junk parts to get by.

He claims Google security guards have started menacingly patrolling the area with sticks and pit bulls, and explains how they routinely called the police for all sorts of trivial and petty things that no one in the area minded before — like forbidding them from collecting bottles and cans from public trash bins near Google’s buildings, depriving them of the chance to make a bit of money by collecting recyclables. "Jerry" says that Google even went so far as to try to prevent them from drinking water.

“Right around the corner here at Gold’s [Gym] is a spigot, a water spigot. Just sticking up out of the ground. We go down get some water in our water bottles and come back. Google calls the cops on us. Gold’s has no problem with us using their water. Gold’s pays for this water,” he says, explaining that the outdoor faucet sticks out of a property that has no connection to Google, but it didn’t matter. Google called the cops if they saw them doing it anyway. “Google thinks they own the whole block.”

A man named Freedom, who was born and raised in Venice and who sleeps on a street behind Google’s property, says he was a victim of a hit-and-run right in front of Google’s office and claims the company refused to release video evidence of the accident.

“I got hit on December 3rd on Hampton — and Google had it on camera, everything. I got hit by a fucking SUV, alright. I went into trauma, I went into cardiac. I almost died. Google has it on camera, but they don’t want to release the DVD, ” he said, showing a deep scar on his forehead. “I lost a lot of blood, but Google won’t do [Censored] about it.” (LAPD told Pando they had no record of the accident.)

Another man claims that a Google security guard spat in his face when he refused to move from a stretch of sidewalk not far from a gate used by “Google Express,” an experimental shopping service.

“Over there I was sitting on a sidewalk… I was sitting down on the curb and he was like, ‘Get out, you can’t be sitting here.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean I can’t be sitting there. Who are you? I’m not moving nowhere.' And he just hocked a loogie right in my face. Right in my eye, too. It was ridiculous. That’s disgusting.”

Evie, who has jet black hair and wears a neat long black dress, criticizes Google for resorting to crude intimidation tactics to clear the homeless.

“If Google sincerely wants to clean up these streets, they need to start pushing and advocating for housing first. Utah finally did something about their homeless population. At least 74 percent of the homeless in Utah now have housing, and it's costing less per person to do that. You need to have stability to function in society. And you can’t function if you don’t have stability."

Evie speaks from experience. She became homeless three years ago, lived in her car for a while, and tried to go through the city's shelter program but realized it was a waste of time. For the past year and a half she had been living here on the street. Her belongings — blankets, bedding and cushions — are stacked on the sidewalk across the street from Google.

“If they would just stop playing games and just put housing first, a lot of people would be able to get their act together, they could get off alcohol, they could get some stability in their lives, they could get a job again. But they don’t want to do it. There is so much money and everything wrapped up in the system and these people with their jobs and everything, they don’t want to actually give housing to anybody and solve the problem. They just want to complain about it. If Google were serious and they wanted to get this area cleaned up, they should advocate for housing first. It’s simple as that. That’s the way I see it.”

The Google security guard I originally spoke to justified the company's aggressive patrolling tactics by saying the homeless people were aggressive and dangerous. "A lady tried to kill me the other day with a U-lock. It was crazy. She was throwing water, went after another security guard. Someone threw a brick through the window there,” he said, pointing at one of the corner buildings recently occupied by Google.

I was skeptical of his claim. In the five years I've lived in the neighborhood and walked through that street, neither I nor my wife nor anyone that I know have ever been threatened or harassed by people sleeping out on the sidewalk.

The local homeless I spoke to didn’t deny that physical altercations between them and Google security guards had taken place. But they put the blame squarely on Google’s shoulders, saying the company's own aggressive tactics were what's causing the pushback from the locals.

"It's horrible, but we basically had to physically threaten them because they were physically threatening us," says "Jesse." "If you have guys down the street carrying sticks, no, you’re not there being peaceful. They had their batons, and they were spinning them around. I don’t like you walking down the street spinning your baton at me, telling me to get to the other side of the street. I’ll be damned if I have anyone intimidate me or run me off a block.”

City of Homeless

Los Angeles has one of the biggest homeless populations in the country. In sheer size, it ranks second after New York. But the city has the largest number of unsheltered homeless in America — people who spend their days and nights living and sleeping on the street. Jerry Jones, executive director of the National Coalition of the Homeless, told CNN that the unsheltered make up two-thirds of the county's 40,000 homeless people. A patch of downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row is basically a giant refugee camp, a tent city within a city. The city’s homeless population has swelled over the past five years. According to some estimates, the number of homeless has grown by nearly 10 percent a year — all thanks to foreclosures, a prolonged economic recession, a continued lack of jobs, and a localized real estate boom that has sent rents and evictions through the roof.

A lack of affordable housing is the leading cause of homelessness in Los Angeles. In Venice in particular, affordable housing has been vanishing at a rapid rate. Driven in part by an influx of tech companies benefitting from Los Angeles’ tax subsidies for Internet businesses and hoping to turn Venice into "Silicon Beach," rents have shot through the roof — increasing by 50 percent just over the last two years. People are being forced out of their apartments with alarming frequency here. Many are leaving the area, while those who can't are being forced out onto the street.

Los Angeles — ever mindful of the needs of real estate developers and landlords, and keen on attracting high-tech businesses into the area — has done a horrible job at addressing the rising homeless problem. Here in Venice, the city's homeless strategy might as well be called “harass and disperse.” It’s tried to criminalize sleeping out in RVs and cars, stepped up police harassment, pushed homeless people off the streets, and attempted to corral them into a tiny two-square-block industrial area — the exact same spot that Google would decide to call home. But while the homeless population there grew, the city failed to provide bathroom facilities, porta-potties, or much of anything in the way of sanitation — operating on the theory that any useful services will only attract more homeless to the area. Naturally, the place got scuzzy and gross.

That was the state of things when Google moved in.

When it first opened its Venice office in late 2011, Google said it wanted to play a part in helping the local community. The company donated money, computer equipment, and volunteer time to local organizations, and hosted a fundraiser for a Venice clinic that provides free healthcare to the homeless. All this made for good PR and guaranteed a good early reception.

Local organizations that work with low-income, minority, and homeless communities knew Google’s move to Venice Beach was going to put a lot of stress on these already extremely vulnerable segments of the population. They were wary, but still hoped that Google, with all its power and influence, would go beyond these token, symbolic actions and work with local organizations to try to tackle the problem of homelessness on a deeper, substantive level.

Those hopes dwindled fast.

“From the point of view of low-income, African-American, and Latino residents of Venice — what does Google mean to us? Pretty much all bad news,” said Bill Przylucki, who heads People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER), a community organization in West Los Angeles. “They are gonna displace other type of businesses that do pay taxes — they are gonna get tax breaks. That means less money for the local park, the library, the public services that we rely on. They are not gonna provide jobs to our folks. Our folks are not the people they are gonna be hiring. They are gonna drive up rents, put more pressure on our folks, and put more pressure on landlords to displace our members through evictions and demolitions.”

Przylucki says POWER approached Google to see if the company would use its influence and sheer star power to push for low-income housing in Venice and Los Angeles, and to fight against the criminalization of poverty in their neighborhood. But their attempts at cooperation went nowhere.

“They have a shitload of power," says Przylucki. “But they didn’t show any interest whatsoever in working with that side of the community. And that silence is deafening in terms of their position.”

Google was more than just silent: Community organizations discovered that Google was almost impossible to reach or talk to in any meaningful way on a local level. The company was so centralized and opaque — and so deaf to local requests — that activists say they've had more success in getting giant banks and subprime lenders like Countrywide Financial to address community concerns than they've had in talking to Google.

"Their structure is really centralized — more so than some other big corporations," Przylucki explained. "An inverse of that is, some of the really big banks we've tangled with on plenty of occasions. We can get quite a bit of meeting with the highest level person in the city or the state — they have quite a bit of power to do some of the things we care about on a local level. But Google is not quite the case. It is not impossible for a giant faceless multinational corporation to still have real people you can do business with at a local level. That is the decision of the corporation and the choice Google has made."

Does Google always harass the press?

I have frequently experienced that wall myself in the course of my reporting on Google — and this story was no exception.

When I talked to Google security guards without identifying myself as a member of the press, they were chummy and polite, freely talking about Google's campaign to clear the area of homeless people. But when I showed up with a filmmaker and a video crew, the attitude was one of instant hostility and denial.

Our plan was to hang out outside of Google and talk to Google employees about what they thought of their company's treatment of the homeless. But we never got a chance. As you can see in the video above, we were immediately accosted by a Google security guard. He yelled at us and demanded to know what we were doing there, without even bothering to introduce himself or to show any ID.

When he found out we were reporting on Venice’s homeless community, he denied that Google had anything to do with pushing homeless people off the street and then got even more aggressive. He called us “paparazzi types” and followed us around, repeatedly jamming his Android phone into our faces and recording us in order to document our identities. It was creepy and disturbing — especially because this all happened on public property.

The security guard was just doing his job: to prevent us from talking to Google employees. And he succeeded, blocking our camera and getting in our faces while Googlers crossed the street safe from our prying lens, and their colleagues gathered at the windows looking at the commotion.

“Do you always harass the press when people are out on the street like this,” I asked him, as he kept blocking the camera and jamming his phone cam into our faces.

“No I don’t always harass the press. I only do it when the press harass us,” he replied.

Google Replies… Sort Of

I reached out to Google several times in the course of my reporting. I wanted to offer someone from the company a chance to sit down with me and watch the interviews we shot with the homeless in Venice. I wanted to show Google what the local community was saying, and give the company the opportunity to respond.

A Google spokesperson declined my offer to sit down and watch the footage, and refused to comment on the record regarding allegations that company security guards had been intimidating the homeless. Google’s public relations department didn’t deny that homeless people were being harassed and pushed out of the area. Instead, the company claimed that it was the result of vague "city processes” that had nothing to do with Google.

Most of Google's response was “off the record.” On the record, the company issued a bland corporate response:

“Hundreds of Googlers have lived and worked in Venice since we opened our doors in 2011, and we’re committed to being good neighbors. We’re currently working with local authorities and the nonprofit community of Los Angeles to see how we can best help to keep Venice’s streets safe and healthy for everyone.”

It also provided a handy list of all the great things that Google’s done for local non-profits that serve low-income and homeless people in Venice and Los Angeles. It wasn’t a very long list, and it mostly consisted of Google helping local organizations by donating free Google gear and services: computers, tablets, analytics services — those kinds of things.

It's a bit bizarre that Google is so proud of this list. The company generates billions in pure profit, pays a meager tax rate that's in the low single digits and has so much cash stashed that it's turned into a giant bond trader and investment company — an entity that competes with giants like PIMCO and BlackRock Inc. With all those resources, the company actually boasts that it's trying to solve homelessness by giving a couple of non-profits Chromebooks and Google Analytics?

The strangest part of Google's response: the spokesperson told me that if I really wanted to find out how great Google has been to the people of Venice, I should get in touch with Mike Bonin, the Los Angeles Councilmember who represents Venice. “Councilmember Bonin’s office is looking forward to hearing from you," the spokesperson wrote — she even indicated the exact person I need to contact.

Apparently, Google had put Bonin’s people on alert. I got in touch with the councilman’s office and immediately got an earful of all the great things that Google is doing for Los Angeles — and the great things that Los Angeles is doing for Google, as well.

"We work closely with Google as we do with any large employer in the area. They are a terrific partner," David Graham-Caso, Bonin's Communications Director, told me by phone. "They are very much engaged in the Venice community and has been very active.”

How exactly is Google engaged?

Well, according to Graham-Caso, there are several new data sharing programs. One is a city partnership with Google push notifications of government events to users of Google Now in real-time, based on location. Another is a data sharing program that feeds the city’s Department of Transportation information on road closures and maintenance and special events into Google's Waze App — so that Google users can get better up-to-date information on city traffic conditions. “That’s one way we're working with Google to make LA a better place to live,” said Graham-Caso.

He also talked up Google's participation in Venice Forward, a "collaborative effort to end homelessness" lashed together by Councilman Bonin earlier this year. It's a nice program that seeks bring together shelters, local businesses, and the non-profits to provide services to the homeless in a more streamlined manner, with the goal of reducing homelessness in Venice by 1o percent over the next two years. Unfortunately, the effort seems to mostly exist on press releases and social media at this point. More importantly, it doesn't seem to include provisions to build local subsidized housing — the only thing that can truly bring down the homelessness rate.

Graham-Caso hyped one of Bonin’s flagship pro-tech initiatives: extending a tax break on Internet-based business, which is aimed at attracting more tech companies to the Venice area: "We'd like to see creative — and community-focused companies like Google has demonstrated itself to be — come to Los Angeles,” he said.

All these new partnerships with Google sat alongside a formal $7.25-million commercial arrangement that goes back to 2009 to run LA's entire email and office infrastructure via Google Apps — Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar. Winning an IT cloud contract for the second-largest city in America was a major coup for Google. The company even got LA's city managers to help promote Google Apps via blog posts and promo videos.

As for complains that harassment of the homeless has increased since Google moved in? “You’ll need to contact LAPD for that,” Graham-Caso told me. I contacted LAPD but they didn't respond.

* * *

Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin like to talk about how they want to leverage their company's resources and immense talent pool to change the world for the better. The company wants to bring Internet connections to the poorest communities around the world and funds efforts to combat human trafficking and gender inequality.

But when confronted at its doorstep with a real societal challenge like homelessness — an issue that truly requires innovation, investment, public service, and political maneuvering — the company simply reverts to the cheapest and meanest solution on the books: hire thugs to push the problem out of sight and force other people deal with it.

For better or worse, Hillary may very well be the Silicon Valley favorite in 2016

by David Holmes

As a pro-business candidate without any wacky ideas about gay people or science denial, Hillary is a Valley corporation's best friend

It’s a good time to be rich and powerful in America.

Corporations make record profits, pay some of the lowest effective tax rates in decades, and pass fewer and fewer of those spoils onto employees, as executive compensation has reached unprecedented heights.

But while an entrepreneur's first $1 million is usually the product of innovation and invention, making and holding onto one's next $1 billion usually requires having some friends in Washington. And as the young Silicon Valley elite grows up, they're less interested in buying sports cars and more interested in buying elections.

Lucky for technology firms like Facebook and Google, they’re coming up at a moment in history when campaign contribution regulations have never been so lax. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC and 2014’s McCutcheon v. FEC, corporations -- and the rich individuals who control them – can donate to committees and parties in support of candidates virtually without limit. Where limitations do exist, they can be easily sidestepped thanks to a wickedly complex apparatus of non-profits. In many cases, contributions can even be made in secret, reserved for the kind of Koch Brother-scale contributions that expose the government to so much corruption, even the remarkably forgiving American public cannot stomach it.

Absurdly high CEO pay, record corporate profits in Silicon Valley, and an erosion by the highest court of the laws shielding America from pay-to-play corruption, have made 2016 arguably the most important election in the history of the tech industry.

According to a report filed yesterday with the Federal Election Commission, in the last quarter of 2015 the Clinton campaign raised more money in California than in any other state, thanks in part to contributions from tech heavyweights like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and eBay CEO John Donahoe. Her California haul totaled $8.1 million, or 17 percent of the $47 million she raised nationwide last quarter.

Clinton may not immediately come to mind when imagining Silicon Valley’s ideal president, but perhaps she should. It’s true that, between Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel*, and scores of Reddit-damaged wantrapreneurs, there’s a strong undercurrent of libertarian politics that have invaded the Valley – one which candidate Rand Paul is eager to play up.

But there’s a tendency within the tech and politics press – as well as among libertarians themselves – to overestimate the influence and prevalence in the Valley of Ayn Rand’s free market dreams. Although contributions have shifted right over the past four years, observers shouldn’t forget that this is an industry of Eric Schmidts and Elon Musks, that threw virtually its unanimous support behind President Obama in 2012.

Moreover, the libertarianism espoused by Republicans like Paul – and, to a larger extent, Ted Cruz – has been filtered through the funhouse mirror of homophobic, racist Tea Party politics, which run counter to the cultures of openness fostered by the Silicon Valley elite, at least on paper. Paul and Cruz oppose big government, unless the government is telling you who you’re allowed to marry.

And finally, Libertarian support in the Valley may also prove to be too fractured to coalesce around one candidate. According to Politico, billionaire Thiel, the closest thing to a household name among the techno-libertarian set, was said to be unhappy with Paul’s policy rollout and/or skeptical of his chances for victory. And while in past elections Thiel has donated $2.6 million to Ron Paul, Rand’s father, the PayPal founder has also made large contributions to Cruz over the years.

So what can Hillary do for the Silicon Valley elite?

Her pitch is hilariously simple: She’s not a lunatic.

“Nobody [in the Valley] is arguing about gay marriage, nobody here is arguing about climate change, nobody here is arguing about evolution,” said Wade Randlett, one of California’s top Democratic fundraisers, speaking to Politico. “It leaves Hillary a wide open [opportunity] to say, ‘Look, I am in the middle of the standard deviation of political thinking in Silicon Valley, and everyone running against me is not.”

It’s not enough, however, for Hillary to merely reject some of the grosser positions of the Republican party as they relate to equal rights and the denial of scientific evidence. While Silicon Valley has built its brand of capitalism independent of the influence of evangelical politics, it’s still capitalism. And they need to know that whoever wins the White House in 2016 will be sympathetic to their corporate needs.

Which is why Bernie Sanders, who over the past few weeks has been closing his second-place gap against Hillary, is likely a non-starter. The Senator told PBS’ Charlie Rose that he supports raising the top marginal tax rate to over 50 percent. He even co-authored a bill called the Corporate Tax Fairness Act, which would hinder the efforts of companies like Apple to keep as much of their profits as possible abroad to avoid paying the US’s higher-than-average corporate tax rate. (Though that rate is only high on paper. Thanks to loopholes, the effective tax paid by US corporations is among the lowest in the Western world).

Meanwhile Hillary’s approach toward corporate excess and worsening income inequality is to repeat the talking points of her predecessor while bringing little new or specific to the table. Her adherence to party talking points when it comes to taxing wealthy individuals and companies betrays an agenda that is far less mindful of middle and lower class Americans than Sanders’. The only thing that’s at all novel or innovative about her plan is in fact rooted in Silicon Valley traditions: Offering tax breaks to firms that share their profits with employees.

It’s still early days for the 2016 presidential race. And once a Republican frontrunner becomes clear, we may find out where the tech industry’s loyalties really lie.

But as a pro-business Democrat without any wacky ideas about gay people or climate-change being God’s-punishment, Hillary may be better suited than any other candidate to a Silicon Valley that’s grown up – and grown richer -- since the Obama days of Hope and Change. Because while Change is good news for companies at the vanguard of disruption, as these firms become more and more a part of the establishment, the status quo starts looking pretty good.

Whoa!!! A cover for their Transhumanist agenda ? It's interesting that Institutes like HeartMath and others have been researching health and aging for years now with research and experiments about the heart and the role it plays. They have discovered much and ways to better ones health and decrease aging much much more naturally than what Google has in mind. There are different choices here concerning the technology aspect in particular. HeartMath uses tech as a tool and the Transhumanist agenda wants to keep humans as tools but less biological and more permeated with controllable technology that oppresses the Sovereign Integral even more and is enslaving beyond what we are dealing with now with the HMS and Hologram of Deception. I know which one of these I choose and it ain't Google. Googles focus on being innovative and progressive is that for but the few. They are no friends of humanity unless you think being even more oppressed and enslaved is what you want. This reminds me of what it must of been like for Humans 1.0 and why they were so depressed and dysfunctional. I think that is what Google would/will encounter in their experiments to enslave humanity. And notice the more people wake up the more the elite are panicking and in such a hurry to carry out this kind of agenda. I feel it but don't fear it.

Google Is Launching A Company That Hopes To Cure Death

Google is launching a new company with the absurdly ambitious objective of extending our lives.

The company is called "Calico," and it will be run by Arthur Levinson, chairman and ex-CEO of biotech company Genentech.

Google gave exclusive access to Time magazine for a story on the new venture. Underscoring the scope of Google's ambition, the cover of Time asks, "Can Google solve death?" That, in a nutshell, is the goal of Calico.

Sounds like a joke, but it's not.

On Google+, Google CEO Larry Page wrote, "OK … so you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses. And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business."

Levinson is current the chair of Apple's board. He has the blessing of Apple CEO Tim Cook to start this new Google-y company. In a release, Cook said, "For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results."

So, how is Calico going to go about extending our lives, and perhaps, ultimately curing death?

Page doesn't lay out any specific plan. On Google+ he says, "it’s still very early days so there’s not much more to share yet. Of course when Art has something more substantial to communicate (and that will likely take time), he’ll provide an update."

Time reports, "While the company is holding its cards about Calico close to the vest, expect it to use its core data-handling skills to shed new light on familiar age-related maladies. Sources close to the project suggest it will start small and focus entirely on researching new technologies."

It's fine Calico doesn't have an exact plan. It's tackling a huge challenge. If there were some straight line, simple solution, this would have been cured long ago.

This is an outlandish project, but it's the kind of project Page loves. He wants to tackle gigantic problems. That's why Google is doing self driving cars, and balloons floating in the air with Internet connections.

Google which has boatloads of cash, and limitless ambition sees itself as the only company willing to take big risks like this.

"I’m not proposing that we spend all of our money on those kinds of speculative things," says Page in an interview with Time, "But we should be spending a commensurate amount with what normal types of companies spend on research and development, and spend it on things that are a little more long-term and a little more ambitious than people normally would. More like moon shots."

Here's the full, official press release:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – September 18, 2013 – Google today announced Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer and a founding investor.

Announcing this new investment, Larry Page, Google CEO said: “Illness and aging affect all our families. With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives. It’s impossible to imagine anyone better than Art—one of the leading scientists, entrepreneurs and CEOs of our generation—to take this new venture forward.” Art said: “I’ve devoted much of my life to science and technology, with the goal of improving human health. Larry’s focus on outsized improvements has inspired me, and I’m tremendously excited about what’s next.”

Art Levinson will remain Chairman of Genentech and a director of Hoffmann-La Roche, as well as Chairman of Apple.

Commenting on Art’s new role, Franz Humer, Chairman of Hoffmann-La Roche, said: “Art’s track record at Genentech has been exemplary, and we see an interesting potential for our companies to work together going forward. We’re delighted he’ll stay on our board.”

Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said: “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”And here's his Google+ entry:

I’m excited to announce Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.

OK … so you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses. And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.

Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness. These issues affect us all—from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families. And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people.

Our press release has a few more details though it’s still very early days so there’s not much more to share yet. Of course when Art has something more substantial to communicate (and that will likely take time), he’ll provide an update. Finally, thanks to Bill Maris for helping bring this idea to life and getting Art involved, and to Sergey Brin for consistently supporting 10X thinking like this. It’s hard for many companies to make long term investments. So I’m tremendously excited about the innovative new way we’re funding this project. Now for the hard work!

And Arthur Levinson is also on Google+ with an announcement:

You may have seen the news (http://goo.gl/KjRE4q) that Google and I will be starting a new company focused on health, aging and well-being, called Calico. I’m honored and incredibly enthusiastic about this opportunity, and eager to get started.

I suspect there are a lot of questions, such as how this came about, what we hope to accomplish, and why “Calico.” When I served on Google’s board, +Larry Page and I got to know each other well—and when he and Bill Maris approached me about a venture that would take the long term view on aging and illness, I was deeply intrigued. For example, what underlies aging? Might there be a direct link between certain diseases and the aging process? We agreed that with great people, a strong culture and vision and a healthy disregard for the impossible, we could make progress tackling these questions, and improving people’s lives.

Calico is an abbreviation for the “California Life Company,” but if you’re thinking about cats, we like the old saying that they have nine lives...

I want to thank several people who have been supportive of this venture, especially Tim Cook, Franz Humer, Bill Maris and my family.

Finally, this would not be possible without Larry, whose focus on outsized improvements is motivating and inspiring, and I couldn’t be more excited about what lies ahead.

JOHN McAFEE: Either President Obama's cybersecurity advisers are incompetent, or our enemies have planted agents at the highest level of our government

John McAfee, Contributor

John McAfee is running for US president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed he wrote and gave us permission to run.

I cannot accept the possibility that a sitting US president would willingly and knowingly hand our country over to our enemies, lock, stock, and barrel. Perhaps I am more naive than I think, but my mind cannot possibly conceive that.

Yet, President Obama, in his speech at SXSW, is suggesting that we do exactly that by creating backdoors into encryption.

He couched his proposition in terms of privacy versus security, yet that issue pales to utter insignificance compared to the real issue: ease of access to criminal activities by our government versus the total annihilation of America by China, Russia or any other hostile state that will be given access to all of America's secrets through that same backdoor.

For here is the issue: Any master key or backdoor to software or encryption that is given to the US government will reside in the hands of our enemies within a matter of weeks of its creation. This is an absolute truth no cybersecurity expert can deny. And I cannot accept that our sitting president understands this and is still willing to carry it out. I will not accept it.

The implication, then, is this: Either Obama’s cybersecurity advisers are incompetent beyond all measure or our enemies have succeeded in planting subversive agents at the highest level of our government. To assume the latter requires more courage than I possess, so I must assume, no matter how shocking it sounds, that Obama’s cybersecurity advisers have not kept up with the dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape of the world of cybersecurity. It would partially explain, at least, why the US is hopelessly behind China and Russia in cybersecurity.

How do we, as cybersecurity professionals know that such a backdoor would be in the hands of our enemies, and for that matter in the hands of every black hat hacker in the world, in a matter of days? It is simple: We are talking about software. A secret key, or backdoor, would be detected by the first hacker that got his or her hands on the phone or the piece of encryption software in question. And how?

By running a compare program against the previously known version of the software that had been released. This compare program would identify and isolate any changes made to the software. The hacker would then run a disassembly program against the changes made and the disassembler would convert the machine language into readable program instructions that would tell the hacker exactly what the new code does and how. For a talented hacker, this process might take less than an hour, after which the hacker now has the master key and the game is over.

Even Michael Hayden, the ex-director of the NSA, understands this issue. He recently stated: “America is simply more secure with unbreakable end-to-end encryption" — and in a "slam dunk."

We need to ask, as American citizens, “What in God’s name is going on within our government?” We are on the brink of a cyberwar of unimaginable proportions. I defy you to find a single talented cybersecurity expert who will not confirm this. Why then is our president insisting that we disarm ourselves?

Can it be that the president, or his advisers, failed to consider the fact that every member of congress, every FBI agent, every member of our military, every US covert agent and perhaps the president himself, carries a smart phone or other mobile device nearly everywhere?

Will everyone within the US government, within every state government, carry a unique device that does not use encryption with a backdoor?

If that is the plan, then how could it be enforced? How can you ban, within the entire government, the ownership of an iPhone or an Android device? And if you cannot ban such, then our government as well as its citizens will be at the mercy of any and every hostile nation and agent in the world. There will be no secrets that will not be instantly known by our enemies.SEE ALSO: McAfee reveals the one way he could hack the iPhone without Apple's help

I'm pretty sure that the F.B.I have access to a super computer if not from Google. What a circus and farce this is and especially when you see these so called leaders taking meaningless oaths outright lying for the world to see. Unbelievable that they haven't caught on yet. They seem to be working in automatic programming I wonder, have they been fitted with some tech hardware as experiments in Google's Transhumanist agenda? Are they being that remotely controlled? Hmmm...I wonder....

John McAfee reveals the one way he could hack the iPhone without Apple's helpTech Insider

Paul Szoldra, Tech Insider

Eccentric software tycoon John McAfee says he knows the one way a non-Apple employee could unlock the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter, and it's a process that would give the FBI what it wants without requiring Apple to build a backdoor.

Initially, McAfee had joked he would do it with social engineering — i.e., tricking people into helping. "That was all bullshit," he told Tech Insider in a phone interview. "Of course I'm going to say social engineering, but think about it: How in the hell are you going to social engineer a dead guy's phone. Get real."

The real way to hack into the iPhone? At first, McAfee was reluctant to say.

"We're treading a very sensitive line here, my friend," he said. He called the mobile phone the greatest potential spy device in the world and said he'd never write the absolute truth about how to crack it. "I said I could do it. That's true. Absolutely, I can do it."

McAfee said he would tell me how it can be done as long as I didn't publish it, otherwise he'd "probably get popped by the FBI, or Apple would take out a contract on me." I wasn't sure if he was joking or serious, but maybe it was a bit of both.

At 70 years old, McAfee is among the old school hackers who worked on computers in the 1960s and 70s long before they were mainstream and miniaturized. After programming stints with NASA, Xerox, Lockheed, and others, he became a multi-millionaire once he sold his shares in the world's first antivirus software company, which he founded, named McAfee Associates.

And that's about where his back story goes off the rails, as the software legend later moved to Belize, surrounded himself with guns and drugs, and then fled after being suspected as a "person of interest" in the murder of one of his neighbors (He denied any involvement and accused Belize of wanting to kill him).

Though he is known for his paranoia and despite an almost-unbelievable back story, his technical credentials are well-established. So I heard him out, as he told me about taking apart the hardware in the shooter's iPhone 5C and working with supercomputers to crack it.

After our conversation, I searched within the technical community and noticed others talking about this method. Then I asked if he'd let me publish his comments. "Go ahead," McAfee wrote to me. "You have my permission."

'There is only one way'

"There is only one way for a non-Apple employee to do this, without the help of Apple," McAfee said. "That is to decap the A6 chip, which is the processor chip inside the iPhone."

McAfee said that if the FBI wanted, it could literally strip the iPhone hardware apart and access the phone's chip. On this chip is a unique identifier, called a UID, which pairs up with the passcode to create the phone's encryption key.

If the FBI tried running a supercomputer right now to guess the unlock code, it would be up against a nearly-infinite number of possibilities. But if they had the UID, that number would come down to something more manageable.

"Then we've got it down to, I don't know, four or five trillion possibilities," McAfee said. "Good God, a supercomputer will give us an answer in five minutes."

It's a solution that others in the technical community have been discussing recently. One of the top answers on Stack Exchange details how one could use an electronic microscope and laser drilling to get the UID bit by bit, and even Edward Snowden believes it's a plausible method that's being ignored by the FBI because the agency wants a court precedent.

"The FBI has other means ... they told the courts they didn't, but they do," Snowden said in a virtual talk hosted by Johns Hopkins University, according to 9to5 Mac.

"Other means" are exactly what McAfee describes, though it's extremely risky. If at any point in de-capping the chip and probing it an error is made, the chip could be destroyed and access to the phone's memory would be completely lost.

But at least one cybersecurity researcher who spoke with ABC News says he has successfully used this method on other targets in the past, while another assumes the NSA has the technical capability and experience to pull it off.

"You decap the chip. You get a probe machine. I don't know if the FBI has got a probe machine. If not, we'll rent one from the Chinese," McAfee said.

Also, McAfee said, this method wouldn't come up against Apple's built-in security feature that would wipe data off the phone if the passcode is entered incorrectly 10 times, because there wouldn't be any power to the actual phone itself. "We're not going to enter the passcode until we find the passcode."

The method only applies to the shooter's version of the iPhone, the 5C. Apple implemented a major update to 5S and newer iPhones with its A7 chip featuring a "secure enclave" that theoretically can't be cracked into even if Apple wanted to. (Although there's still some debate on that, and Apple has not responded to requests for clarification.)

Apple Lambasts the FBI for Not Asking the NSA to Help Hack That iPhone

In the showdown between Apple and the Justice Department over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooting suspects, one question has loomed large. Why hasn’t the FBI sought assistance from the National Security Agency—which employs some of the nation’s top hackers—to crack into the iPhone? Apple has touched on that question lightly in other briefs filed in the case, but today it focused on it more extensively in its latest brief submitted to the court.

“The government does not deny that there may be other agencies in the government that could assist it in unlocking the phone and accessing its data; rather, it claims, without support, that it has no obligation to consult other agencies,” Apple wrote, noting that FBI Director James Comey danced around the question of NSA assistance when asked about it during a recent congressional hearing.

And if the FBI can’t on its own break into iPhones without NSA help, it should invest in developing that capability, Apple says, instead of seeking unconstitutional ways to force tech companies to assist it.

“Defining the scope of the All Writs Act as inversely proportional to the capabilities of the FBI removes any incentive for it to innovate and develop more robust forensic capabilities,” Apple wrote. The company quotes Susan Landau, a professor of cybersecurity policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has said that “[r]ather than asking industry to weaken protections, law enforcement must instead develop a capability for conducting sophisticated investigations themselves.”

The Government Is Misinterpreting the All Writs Act

Apple’s latest brief—the last to be filed before the two sides meet in court next week for oral arguments—focuses on refuting much of the government’s claims around the All Writs Act, the 200-year-old statute the government has said gives it authority to compel the tech company to assist it in unlocking the iPhone.

Federal Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym issued an order last month requiring Apple to create a special software tool that would eliminate specific security protections the company built into its phone software. The tool would help the FBI crack the password on the iPhone and thereby decrypt data stored on the device.

But Apple filed a motion to vacate the order, saying it’s unconstitutional on several grounds and violates the separation of powers doctrine in that it would give the court and government authority that Congress never granted them and usurp Congress’s “exclusive constitutional authority to make laws.”

The government has cited US v New York Telephone Company as one of the primary precedent-setting cases that give it authority under the All Writs Act. In that case, the government required New York Telephone company to provide technical assistance to record numbers dialed from a phone in what is known as a pen-register. New York Telephone objected, saying the pen-register statute didn’t require companies to provide technical assistance. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the phone company could be compelled to assist because it was already collecting this information as a matter of course for its own business purposes, in order to bill customers, detect fraud and conduct troubleshooting. As long as the assistance being sought was not unduly burdensome to the company, it could be compelled to assist.

Apple says the All Writs Act doesn’t grant the different authority the government is seeking in this case, and that the government is attempting “to rewrite history by portraying the Act as an all-powerful magic wand rather than the limited procedural tool it is.”

The government “portrays the All Writs Act as a ‘broad,’ ‘venerable,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘adaptable’ font of virtually unlimited authority empowering courts to issue any and all orders that the government requests in the pursuit of ‘justice’,” Apple writes. “This is an exercise in wishful thinking, not statutory interpretation.”

The All Writs Act is supposed to be a limited procedure statute, but under the government’s interpretation of it, courts can order private parties to do virtually anything “short of kidnapping or breaking an express law,” Apple writes. “The Founders would be appalled.”

This Is an Issue Only Congress Can Decide

The All Writs Act, Apple says, is meant to allow courts to issue orders to carry out congressional intent where its clear that Congress wanted the courts to have a certain power but didn’t spell out the procedural steps for executing that power. But Apple says there is no evidence that Congress ever intended to force companies to decrypt data or write software that they view as dangerous to assist the government in decrypting data. Instead, there is evidence that Congress intended the contrary.

In the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a law passed in 1994 that defines the circumstances under which telecoms must assist law enforcement in conducting electronic surveillance through wiretaps, Congress specifically opted not to give the government power to order a company to help decrypt data if the company does not possess the decryption key. CALEA also does not prohibit a company from employing an encryption scheme for which it does not retain the ability to decrypt communications.

“[U]nder CALEA,” Apple notes, the company “cannot be required to ‘ensure the government’s ability’ to decrypt or to create decryption programs the company does not already ‘possess’.”

More recently, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have signaled their continuing opposition to forced decryption. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced legislation in 2014 that would prohibit the government from compelling companies like Apple to install backdoors in encrypted systems that would allow the government to decrypt protected communications.

The Justice Department has said that the Supreme Court emphasized in other cases that meaningful conclusions cannot be drawn from Congress’s silence on particular matters. But Apple responded in its brief today that although “silence is sometimes a weak indicator of intent, it is a different story when Congress actively considers legislation to address a major policy issue, yet deliberately declines to enact it.”

Apple also says that CALEA’s prohibition on forcing a company to help decrypt data for which it does not hold a key is “neither ‘hypothetical nor abstract'” and makes Congress’s intentions clear.

“The Justice Department and FBI are seeking an order from this Court that would force Apple to create exactly the kind of operating system that Congress has thus far refused to require,” Apple wrote. “They are asking this Court to resolve a policy and political issue that is dividing various agencies of the Executive Branch as well as Congress. This Court should reject that request, because the All Writs Act does not authorize such relief, and the Constitution forbids it.”

Apple made a plea for the court not to ignore the public debate around the issue. “[T]he Justice Department and FBI argue that this Court must decide the issue in a vacuum, without regard to either the swirling national debate about mandating a back door or the dangers to the security and privacy of millions of citizens posed by the relief they seek on behalf of the United States. But to determine whether this is an issue capable of judicial resolution under the All Writs Act and the Constitution, the Court not only can consider this broader context, it must do so.”

The Government Is Misinterpreting Past Precedents

Apple lawyers said in a phone call with reporters today that the government has misinterpreted a number of court cases it has cited to support its position. All of the prior court cases the government has cited as precedent are “light years away” from the facts in this case and don’t apply to it, they said.

One precedent the government cited was the 1807 case of United States v. Burr, in which Chief Justice Marshall held that a clerk working for former Vice President Aaron Burr could be forced to decipher a coded letter of Burr’s, “provided that doing so would not incriminate the clerk.” Apple said in its brief today that the Burr case has nothing to do with the All Writs Act, nothing to do with software, and nothing to do with decrypting data. The question posed to Burr was whether he understood the cipher used to encrypt the data; the court ruled that answering that question alone would not incriminate him.

Apple Says It Has No Special Relationship With China

Last week in a separate brief filed with the court, the government accused Apple of deliberately raising technological barriers that prevent it from assisting authorities with a lawful warrant and of doing this to better market its products.

Apple’s lawyers shot back at this today, saying it has never marketed its security as something that would prevent law enforcement from obtaining data from its phones.

Apple also took issue with suggestions the government made in its filing that the tech giant is in some kind of collusion with the Chinese government in storing the data of Chinese users in that country. The government implied that Apple might be providing the Chinese government with access to data that it won’t give the US government. The government provided no information to support this.

Apple called the government’s attacks an act of “desperation” and said that it stores the iCloud data of Chinese customers on servers in China, but the data is encrypted and the key to decrypt it is held in the US. Apple said that it has provided no more assistance to the Chinese government than it has supplied to the US.

A hearing has been scheduled for March 22 to provide the judge with oral arguments in the case.

Apple’s latest brief in its battle with the FBI over the San Bernardino iPhone offered the tech company an opportunity to school the Feds over their misinterpretation and misquotations of a number of statutes and legal cases they cited as precedent in their own brief last week. Many viewed Apple’s arguments as a withering commentary on the government’s poor legal acumen.

According to Apple, many of the cases the government uses to support its argument that the All Writs Act can be used to compel Apple to help crack the phone don’t actually have anything to do with the All Writs Act, or encryption, or anything of relevance to the current case.

Today I learned that #Apple has way better lawyers than the DOJ.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 15, 2016

Apple’s brief was interesting reading. They make the DOJ/FBI lawyers sound like they are 8 year olds with a too-high Adderall dosage.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) March 15, 2016

I love how Apple thought it necessary to spell out the law on a chalkboard here, so DOJ would understand it. pic.twitter.com/0V6jGTkDXk

— Jonathan Ździarski (@JZdziarski) March 16, 2016

But the tech giant didn’t stop there. It also pointed out a number of technical errors the government’s forensic experts made in their court filings last week.

These include one FBI expert’s assertion that the suspect, Syed Rizwan Farook, had selectively disabled iCloud backups for some of the apps and data on his phone.

“iCloud backups for ‘Mail,’ ‘Photos,’ and ‘Notes’ were all turned off on the subject device,” Christopher Pluhar, a supervisory special agent with the FBI, wrote in an affidavit filed by the Justice Department. Pluhar had evidently viewed the screen on other iPhones that the FBI had used to “restore” or sync data that was stored in the iCloud account associated with Farook’s phone. Those phones would reflect the settings that had been on Farook’s phone when it backed up to the iCloud.

But in a declaration filed yesterday, Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s manager of user privacy, suggested that Pluhar needed more training.

“This is false because it is not possible,” Neuenschwander wrote. “Agent Pluhar was likely looking at the wrong screen on the device. Specifically, he was not looking at the settings that govern the iCloud backups. It is the iCloud backup screen that governs what is backed up to iCloud. That screen has no ‘on’ and ‘off’ options for ‘Mail,’ ‘Photos,’ or ‘Notes.'”

In fact, Neuenschwander added, users “cannot exclude individual Apple apps on a one-by-one basis from backing up to iCloud.” The only exception, he wrote, was that a user can choose to have their photos stored in their iCloud Photo Library instead of in their iCloud backup, or choose to not store photos at all. “Once iCloud backup is enabled, all other Apple apps will backup with no configurable settings for the user,” he wrote. This means contacts, calendar events, reminders, notes, device settings, call history, home screen and app organization, iMessage, and text messages would all have been backed up to Farook’s iCloud account if he enabled iCloud backups on his phone.

Pluhar also made another error that Neuenschwander pointed out. The FBI agent had claimed that even if the phone had backed up data to its associated iCloud account, the FBI would still need Apple’s help to gain access to the phone to physically extract other data that doesn’t get backed up to iCloud—specifically, keystrokes left in the cache.

“[W]ith iCloud back-ups of iOS devices (such as iPhones or iPads),” Pluhar wrote, “device-level data, such as the device keyboard cache, typically does not get included in iCloud back-ups but can be obtained through extraction of data from the physical device. The keyboard cache, as one example, contains a list of recent keystrokes typed by the user on the touchscreen. From my training and my own experience, I know that data found in such areas can be critical to investigations.”

But Neuenschwander pointed out that this was wrong as well. “The keyboard cache in iOS 9 does not contain a list of 28 keystrokes typed by the user, or anything similar,” he wrote.

Apple appeared to sum up its assessment of the government’s incorrect understanding of the legal and technical issues in the case in a quote at the end of its brief yesterday:

“Almost 90 years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis, reflecting on the ‘progress of science’ beyond wiretapping famously warned that ‘[t]he greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding’.”

Throughout the ongoing fight between Apple and the FBI over custom access to an iPhone used by one of the two terrorists who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, the government has framed the argument as a simple trade-off: You must surrender a little privacy if you want more security. The scales don’t balance quite so neatly, though; there’s nothing secure about giving the FBI their way. Still, it’s been an effective way for the government to win over the public, on its way to trying to win over the courts.

FBI director James Comey most recently pushed the dichotomy in an op-ed for Lawfare. “We have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety,” he writes. “That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living.”

It also should not be framed as an absolute. Doing so presents the issue to the American public in a way that makes the FBI’s request palatable while obfuscating the potentially dangerous precedent it would represent.

Added Insecurities

The case against the FBI’s insistence that it is not asking for all that much has been made repeatedly, both here and elsewhere. In fact, a team of researchers offered a version of it last year when they published the prescient paper “Keys Under Doormats.” [.pdf]

“As computer scientists with extensive security and systems experience, we believe that law enforcement has failed to account for the risks inherent in exceptional access systems,” the group wrote in July. The risks of that type of backdoor include adding complexity to an already intricate system that’s difficult to keep secure, and the impossibility of creating access that would be used solely by the FBI. Any backdoor accessible to law enforcement can and also would be used by a hacker for any number of nefarious reasons.

“It would be great if we could make a backdoor that only the FBI could walk through,” says Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But that doesn’t exist. And literally every single mathematician, cryptographer, and computer scientist who’s looked at it has agreed.”

The current Apple case doesn’t involve a backdoor in the traditional sense. The FBI is asking Apple to create a tool that would circumvent a feature that deletes all of the information on the phone after 10 failed password attempts. “We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey wrote. But the authority it would grant the FBI could be used again across a range of scenarios that weaken our privacy, sure, but our security as well.

“The precedent isn’t that they unlock one phone,” says Jake Williams, CEO of Rendition Infosec. “There’s no reason down the road they can’t go to Microsoft, or anyone else, for that matter, to create some intentionally vulnerable applications.” In the scenario Williams envisions, the FBI could force Microsoft to send out a malicious Windows update to any machine connected to a specific IP address, like the Wi-Fi at a coffee shop.

In truth, you don’t need to look as far ahead as that. In a newly unsealed court brief, Apple lawyer Marc Zwillinger reveals that the company has challenged at least a dozen recent FBI requests to unlock iPhones by various means. In some cases, Apple could extract the requested data without creating a new tool. In four instances cited in the brief, though, the iPhones in question run iOS 8 or later, the operating system a new tool would be designed to circumvent.

Not only, therefore, is this not just about “this one phone,” as the FBI has insisted. It’s not even about hypothetical future cases. The ruling, or at least the precedent it sets, could assist the government in at least four instances Apple is currently fighting. It also could apply beyond our borders, in countries with whose governments have concerning human rights records.

“If China [today] demanded that Apple put in a backdoor, Apple would say no,” says Cardozo, adding that the company could threaten to pull its products from the market, creating a public relations nightmare for the Chinese government. “That equation changes once Apple accedes to an FBI order. If the FBI can compel Apple to do it, and it’s publicly known that Apple has given the FBI this key, then China has a very different calculus … The PR around a Chinese demand gets a lot better for China, and a whole hell of a lot worse for Apple.”

And increasingly, it’s the PR that matters.

Massaging the Message

What’s important to understand about the San Bernadino iPhone case is that its very existence is a public relations maneuver.

“The FBI chose this case very, very carefully,” says Cardozo, who argues that law enforcement sees it as the “perfect case” for litigating the issue in the absence of backdoor-friendly legislation from President Obama and Congress. That it’s a terrorism case, in particular, spurs sympathies to align with law enforcement, regardless of how much benefit the FBI would actually get from the access it has requested.

“I think if the FBI said hey, we want to architect backdoors into devices so that we can get access to whatever we need, whenever we need it—need being a relative term there—I think the public in general would not be for that,” says Williams.

So far, buoyed by the specter of terrorism and the false duality of privacy and security, the public in general is buying what the FBI is selling. A recent Pew Research poll found that 51 percent of Americans think Apple “Should unlock the iPhone to assist the ongoing FBI investigation,” while 38 percent say Apple should not. (The rest had no opinion.) Even the survey itself shows how effective the FBI’s messaging has been. Apple is not being asked to unlock an iPhone; it’s being asked to create software that would help the FBI unlock it. After which, there’s every reason to expect Apple and every other tech company will be asked to create more software that could be used to diminish even more civil liberties.

At the same time, the FBI has managed to attack Apple’s posture of altruism, saying in a recent court filing that the company’s resistance was rooted in “its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy,” not larger security concerns.

It’s an odd construction in that it assumes the two are mutually exclusive. Security has long been part of Apple’s sales pitch, but that doesn’t diminish its importance.

For its part, Apple has posted both a strident defense of its opposition and an FAQ for customers, which reiterate largely the same points: That compliance would open the door to a host of security and privacy oversteps. It has also reached out directly to the press, both to clarify its position and embarrass its opponent.

In many ways, Apple’s is the tougher sell, because the way computer security works means that it has to be absolute. Any precedent that says a company can be compelled to weaken its security will have injurious consequences, full stop. There are no shades of grey, no matter what politicians and law enforcement might suggest.

“You hear over and over and over again, from the pro-backdoor camp, that we need to strike a balance, we need to find a compromise,” says Cardozo. “That doesn’t work. Math doesn’t work like that. Computer security doesn’t work like that … It’s kind of like climate change. There are entrenched political interests on one side of a ‘debate,’ and on the other side is the unanimous scientific and technical community.”

The Void of Legislation

Ultimately, the reason this debate is happening at all is that there’s no legislative guidance around encryption. The All Writs Act that the FBI has cited dates to 1798, and even the most recent supporting precedent dates to 1977. Until Congress acts, the FBI will continue to attempt to gain access through the courts.

“These issues will be decided in Congress,” Bill Gates said in a recent Bloomberg TV interview, attempting to clarify previous comments that had been wrongly interpreted as him favoring the FBI. “You don’t want to just take the minute after a terrorist event and swing that direction, nor do you want to swing away from government access when you get some abuse being revealed. You want to strike that balance.”

That resolution may be forthcoming. In an open letter to Comey today, US Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, asked that the FBI withdraw its case in favor of letting the legislative branch do its job. “We should all take a breath and talk to each other,” he writes, echoing Comey’s call that Americans “take a deep breath” about the debate, “rather than use a lawsuit to circumvent the critical and necessary policy discussions.”

Lieu, one of four sitting federal lawmakers with a computer science degree, has dabbled in encryption legislation before, having recently proposed a bill that would preempt states from haphazardly passing their own anti-encryption laws. At the time, he was hesitant about introducing legislation that would have a broader impact, but his stance appears to have possibly evolved.

“The precedent set in this case would essentially enact a policy proposal to weaken encryption that has not yet gained traction in Congress and was previously rejected by the White House,” says Lieu. “Let Congress, stakeholders, and the American people debate and resolve these difficult issues, not unelected judges based on conflicting interpretations of a law passed 87 years before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.”

And when those debates do happen, let’s also make sure they’re not framed by misleading dichotomies like “privacy versus security.” We can’t give up one without presenting a grave threat to the other.

The news this week that a magistrate ordered Apple to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooter suspects has polarized the nation—and also generated some misinformation.

Those who support the government say Apple has cooperated in the past to unlock dozens of phones in other cases—so why can’t it help the FBI unlock this one?

But this isn’t about unlocking a phone; rather, it’s about ordering Apple to create a new software tool to eliminate specific security protections the company built into its phone software to protect customer data. Opponents of the court’s decision say this is no different than the controversial backdoor the FBI has been trying to force Apple and other companies to build into their software—except in this case, it’s an after-market backdoor to be used selectively on phones the government is investigating.

The stakes in the case are high because it draws a target on Apple and other companies embroiled in the ongoing encryption/backdoor debate that has been swirling in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill for the last two years. Briefly, the government wants a way to access data on gadgets, even when those devices use secure encryption to keep it private.

Apple specifically altered its software in 2014 to ensure that it would not be able to unlock customer phones and decrypt any of the most important data on them; but it turns out it overlooked a loophole in doing this that the government is now trying to exploit. The loophole is not about Apple unlocking the phone but about making it easier for the FBI to attempt to unlock it on its own. If the controversy over the San Bernardino phone causes Apple to take further steps to close that loophole so that it can’t assist the FBI in this way in the future, it could be seen as excessive obstinance and obstruction by Capitol Hill. And that could be the thing that causes lawmakers to finally step in with federal legislation that prevents Apple and other companies from locking the government out of devices.

If the FBI is successful in forcing Apple to comply with its request, it would also set a precedent for other countries to follow and ask Apple to provide their authorities with the same software tool.

In the interest of clarifying the facts and correcting some misinformation, we’ve pulled together a summary of the issues at hand.

What Kind of Phone Are We Talking About?

The phone in question is an iPhone 5c running the iOS9 version of Apple’s software. The phone is owned by the San Bernardino Department of Public Health, which gave it to Syed Rizwan Farook, the shooter suspect, to use for work.

What Is the Issue?

Farook created a password to lock his phone, and due to security features built into the software on his device, the FBI can’t unlock the phone and access the data on it using the method it wants to use—a bruteforce password-guessing technique wherein they enter different passcodes repeatedly until they guess the right one—without running the risk that the device will lock them out permanently.

How Would It Do That?

Apple’s operating system uses two factors to secure and decrypt data on the phone–the password the user chooses and a unique 256-bit AES secret key that’s embedded in the phone when it’s manufactured. As cryptographer Matthew Green explains in a blog post, the user’s password gets “tangled” with the secret key to create a passcode key that both secures and unlocks data on the device. When the user enters the correct password, the phone performs a calculation that combines these two codes and if the result is the correct passcode, the device and data are unlocked.

To prevent someone from brute-forcing the password, the device has a user-enabled function that limits the number of guesses someone can try before the passcode key gets erased. Although the data remains on the device, it cannot be decrypted and therefore becomes permanently inaccessible. The government’s motion to the court (.pdf) notes that this happens after 10 failed guesses when the auto-erase feature is enabled by the user.

The government says it does not know for certain if Farook’s device has the auto-erase feature enabled, but notes in its motion that San Bernardino County gave the device to Farook with it enabled, and the most recent backup of data from his phone to iCloud “showed the function turned on.”

A reasonable person might ask why, if the phone was backing data up to iCloud, the government can’t just get everything it needs from iCloud instead of breaking into the phone. The government did obtain some data backed up to iCloud from the phone, but authorities allege in their court document that he may have disabled iCloud backups at some point. They obtained data backed up to iCloud a month before the shootings, but none closer to the date of the shooting, when they say he is most likely to have used the phone to coordinate the attack.Is This Auto-Erase the Only Security Protection Apple Has in Place?

No. In addition to the auto-erase function, there’s another protection against brute force attacks: time delays. Each time a password is entered on the phone, it takes about 80 milliseconds for the system to process that password and determine if it’s correct. This helps prevent someone from quickly entering a new password to try again, because they can only guess a password every 80 milliseconds. This might not seem like a lot of time, but according to Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, a company that does extensive consulting on iOS security, it can be prohibitively long depending on the length of the password.

“In terms of cracking passwords, you usually want to crack or attempt to crack hundreds or thousands of them per second. And with 80 milliseconds, you really can only crack eight or nine per second. That’s incredibly slow,” he said in a call to reporters this week.

With a four-digit passcode, he says, there are only about 10,000 different combinations a password-cracker has to try. But with a six-digit passcode, there are about one million different combinations a password cracker would have to try to guess the correct one—a simple six-digit passcode composed of just numbers would take a couple of days to crack, Guido says; but a more complex six-character password composed of letters and numbers could take more than five-and-a-half-years, according to Apple. The iOS9 software, which appears to be the software on the San Bernardino phone, asks you to create a six-digit password by default, though you can change this requirement to four digits if you want a shorter one.

Later models of phones use a different chip than the iPhone 5c and have what’s called a “secure enclave” that adds even more time delays to the password-guessing process. Guido describes the secure enclave as a “separate computer inside the iPhone that brokers access to encryption keys” increasing the security of those keys.

With the secure enclave, after each wrong password guess, the amount of time you have to wait before trying another password grows with each try; by the ninth failed password you have to wait an hour before you can enter a tenth password. The government mentioned this in its motion to the court, as if the San Bernardino phone has this added delay. But the iPhone 5c does not have secure enclave on it, so the delay would really only be the usual 80 milliseconds in this case.

Why None of This Is an Issue With Older iPhones

With older versions of Apple’s phone operating system—that is, phones using software prior to iOS8—Apple has the ability to bypass the user’s passcode to essentially unlock the device and access data on the phone. It has done so in dozens of cases over the years, pursuant to a court order. But beginning with iOS8, Apple changed this so that it securely encrypts all of the most important data on your phone by default—photos, messages, contacts, call history—using the password you choose. And Apple cannot bypass your password to obtain that data.

According to the motion filed by the government in the San Bernardino case, the phone in question is using a later version of Apple’s operating system—which appears to be iOS9. We’re basing this on a statement in the motion that reads: “While Apple has publicized that it has written the software differently with respect to iPhones such as the SUBJECT DEVICE with operating system (“iOS”)9, Apple yet retains the capacity to provide the assistance sought herein that may enable the government to access the SUBJECT DEVICE pursuant to the search warrant.”

The government is referring to the changes that Apple made with iOS8 that exist in iOS9 as well. Apple released iOS9 in September 2015, three months before the San Bernardino attacks occurred, so it’s very possible this is indeed the version installed on the San Bernardino phone.

After today, technology vendors need to consider that they might be the adversary they're trying to protect their customers from.

What Does the Government Want?

A lot of people have misconstrued the government’s request and believe it asked the court to order Apple to unlock the phone, as Apple has done in many cases before. But as noted, the particular operating system installed on this phone does not allow Apple to bypass the passcode and decrypt the data. So the government wants to try bruteforcing the password without having the system auto-erase the decryption key and without additional time delays. To do this, it wants Apple to create a special version of its operating system, a crippled version of the firmware that essentially eliminates the bruteforcing protections, and install it on the San Bernardino phone. It also wants Apple to make it possible to enter password guesses electronically rather than through the touchscreen so that the FBI can run a password-cracking script that races through the password guesses automatically. It wants Apple to design this crippled software to be loaded into memory instead of on disk so that the data on the phone remains forensically sound and won’t be altered.

Note that even after Apple does all of this, the phone will still be locked, unless the government’s bruteforcing operation works to guess the password. And if Farook kept the iOS9 default requirement for a six-digit password, and chose a complex alpha-numeric combination for his password, the FBI might never be able to crack it even with everything it has asked Apple to do.

Apple CEO Tim Cook described the government’s request as “asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers—including tens of millions of American citizens—from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.”

What Exactly Is the Loophole You Said the Government Is Exploiting?

The loophole is the fact that Apple still retains the ability to run crippled firmware on a device like this without requiring the user to approve it, the way software updates usually work. If this required user approval, Apple would not be able to do what the government is requesting.

How Doable Is All of This?

Guido says the government’s request is completely doable and reasonable.

“They have to make a couple of modifications. They have to make it so that the operating system boots inside of a RAM disk…[and] they need to delete a bunch of code—there’s a lot of code that protects the passcode that they just need to trash,” he said.

Making it possible for the government to test passwords with a script instead of typing them in would take a little more effort he says. “[T]hat would require a little bit of extra development time, but again totally possible. Apple can load a new kernel driver that allows you to plug something in over the [Lightning] port… It wouldn’t be trivial but it wouldn’t be massive.”Could This Same Technique Be Used to Undermine Newer, More Secure Phones?

There has been some debate online about whether Apple would be able to do this for later phones that have newer chips and the secure enclave. It’s an important question because these are the phones that most users will have in the next one or two years as they replace their old phones. Though the secure enclave has additional security features, Guido says that Apple could indeed also write crippled firmware for the secure enclave that achieves exactly what the FBI is asking for in the San Bernardino case.

“It is absolutely within the realm of possibility for Apple themselves to tamper with a lot of the functionality of the secure enclave. They can’t read the secure private keys out of it, but they can eliminate things like the passcode delay,” he said. “That means the solution that they might implement for the 5c would not port over directly to the 5s, the 6 or the 6s, but they could create a separate solution for [these] that includes basically crippled firmware for the secure enclave.”

If Apple eliminates the added time delays that the secure enclave introduces, then such phones would only have the standard 80-millisecond delay that older phones have.

“It requires more work to do so with the secure enclave. You have to develop more software; you have to test it a lot better,” he said. “There may be some other considerations that Apple has to work around. [But] as far as I can tell, if you issue a software update to the secure enclave, you can eliminate the passcode delay and you can eliminate the other device-erase [security feature]. And once both of those are gone, you can query for passcodes as fast as 80 milliseconds per request.”What Hope Is There for Your Privacy?

You can create a strong alpha-numeric password for your device that would make bruteforcing it essentially infeasible for the FBI or anyone else. “If you have letters and numbers and it’s six, seven or eight digits long, then the potential combinations there are really too large for anyone to bruteforce,” Guido said.And What Can Apple Do Going Forward?

Guido says Apple could and should make changes to its system so that what the FBI is asking it to do can’t be done in future models. “There are changes that Apple can make to the secure enclave to further secure their phones,” he said. “For instance, they may be able to require some kind of user confirmation, before that firmware gets updated, by entering their PIN code … or they could burn the secure enclave into the chip as read-only memory and lose the ability to update it [entirely].”

These would prevent Apple in the future from having the ability to either upload crippled firmware to the device without the phone owner’s approval or from uploading new firmware to the secure enclave at all.

“There’s a couple of different options that they have; I think all of them, though, are going to require either a new major version of iOS or new chips on the actual phones,” Guido said. “But for the moment, what you have to fall back on is that it takes 80 milliseconds to try every single password guess. And if you have a complex enough password then you’re safe.”

Is the Ability to Upload Crippled Firmware a Vulnerability Apple Should Have Foreseen?

Guido says no.

“It wasn’t until very recently that companies had to consider: What does it look like if we attack our own customers? What does it look like if we strip out and remove the security mitigations we put in specifically to protect customers?”

He adds: “Apple did all the right things to make sure the iPhone is safe from remote intruders, or people trying to break into the iPhone.… But certainly after today, technology vendors need to consider that they might be the adversary they’re trying to protect their customers from. And that’s quite a big shift.”

Update 2:30 pm EST: To clarify the number of failed password guesses that can occur before the phone deletes the passcode key, making data on the phone inaccessible.

Update 5:30 pm EST: To clarify the security changes Apple made in 2014 that prevent it from unlocking secured data on phones.

Have You Posted Your Pictures on the Internet? Invasive Surveillance Technology Awaits

Editor's note: Please note that as of January 2012, facebook has changed their terms of use (possibly due to overwhelming criticism) and they have modified the original phrasing excerpted below. They now state "you own all of the content and information you post on Facebook", however you grant facebook non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any of your intellectual property content that you post in Facebook. In other words, they can still use your pictures and information at will, when they please and without your permission.

We've all done it at one point or another, posting our pictures of ourselves, family and friends on websites and social network portals such as Facebook. Whether it be submitting your picture to output a cartoon or aged version of yourself, or uploading your personal snapshots to Facebook, marketing campaigns are aggressively being pushed by digital media corporations to obtain your facial biometrics. However, most people are completely unaware of the deceptive nature of these campaigns and their intentions.

Opponents to facial recognition technology are well aware that its acceptance and integration within society are growing in combination with wider use of video surveillance, which is likely to grow increasingly invasive over time. Once installed, this kind of a surveillance system rarely remains confined to its original purpose. New ways of applying the technology are leading to abuse as authorities or operators find them to be an irresistible expansion of their power. Ultimately, the privacy of citizens will suffer another blow. The threat is that widespread surveillance will change the character, feel, and quality of our lives.

The Buzzing Social Network Giants Among Us

Online social networking has revolutionized the way the under-40 crowd communicate and share information with one another. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have become the preferred way of communicating for many people around the world.

According to a study by InSites Consulting, 72 percent of Internet users worldwide are members of at least one social network, which translates to 940 million people globally.

Eastern Europe and Asia are the regions with the lowest social networking participation (4 out of 10), while South America has the highest usage in terms of percentage (95%). Brits mostly visit Facebook (50%), followed by Twitter (42%). Worldwide, Facebook remains the most popular social network (51% use Facebook), followed by MySpace (20%) and Twitter (17%).

It is quite evident that a monopoly in social networking has formed and little is likely to change in the next year. "It is becoming difficult for new social sites to recruit members, said Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting. "The majority of surfers are happy with their current situation and do not want to become members of a new platform."

Media and technology experts estimate that 20% or more of the world's population will be using social networking by 2011. It also means that as older members age, they will post new updated pictures of themselves as they expand their activity and friendships. People average almost 200 friends (global average) on Facebook meaning that the connections within Facebook itself could span around the world with a link to each and every person registered.

Is Big Brother Using The InternetTo Extract Your Biometrics?

Technology expert Ivan Abreu says that Facebook and Google have strong ties to lettered agencies within the U.S. government. "Every picture that you upload to Facebook or Google becomes the property of the government and they can do as they wish with that property" said Abreu. Facebook's terms and conditions confirm that the company can do as they wish with any personal photos or information of any user at their discretion.Facebook's own Terms of use states: "by posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

And in its equally interesting privacy policy: "Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States."

Since December 2006, the Central Intelligence Agency has been using Facebook.com, to recruit potential employees into its National Clandestine Service.

A major source of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Dr. Anita Jones served on In-Q-Tel's board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence. She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

It was when a journalist lifted the lid on the DARPA's Information Awareness Office that the public began to show concern at its information mining projects of which biometric facial recognition was a key component.

Wikipedia's IAO page says: "the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.".

According to Abreu, a confidential source has explained some of the technology behind the social network giant which he reiterated, "not only can they scan items on your Facebook page, but their facial recognition and biometric applications can scan every single photograph within Facebook (billions of images) in real-time...that's the kind of advanced technology and computing power they operate."

The technological capabilities of government agencies have long been known to far exceed even the most advanced public user. Abreu's source identified the facial biometric technology as 'beyond state of the art'. "Regardless of whether it is your profile or a front shot, if your facial biometric signature is anywhere on their database and they have a reference screen capture from a video or even a faxed copy of your photograph, they can retrieve a match with almost 90% accuracy," added Abreu.

Abreu disclosed that access to such images are not solely confined to Facebook. The technology can breach the security of any website and can simultaneously scan and download images it has been programmed to retrieve based on a predefined sequence of algorithmic biometric markers.

According to Abreu, the success and massive marketing strategies by social networking portals have made facial recognition technology that much more attractive to governments. "This technology has proliferated because of public compliance and willful disclosure of personal information." He stated that there are dozens of other companies in addition to Facebook that log and store your information indefinitely.

Many Culprits

In late 2009, Google launched a new mobile search technology called Google Goggles that allows users to submit pictures rather that keywords as queries. Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience explained that Google has been focusing on four aspects of search: modes, media, language, and personalization. New modes of searching, such as voice-driven and image-driven search, represent a major new commitment for Google, an empire built-on keyword search ads.

Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra said that Google Goggles represents the beginning of Google's journey into computer vision. The service is being launched in Google Labs because it's experimental and can only recognize certain objects. Google has the capability to do facial recognition, said Gundotra, but has decided to delay implementing it to mull the privacy implications.

Other interactive internet giants such as InterActive Corp who own subsidiary branches such as Mindspark and Match.com are prime portals to access personal images and information. For example myWebFace is downloaded as a toolbar for your browser and it enables you to create an "online cartoon avatar by choosing from a huge selection of facial features, characteristics and accessories," as stated in their license agreement. They then provide you with the opportunity to use your myWebFace cartoon for your Facebook profile or other social networks.

Another myWebFace invention oldyourself.com digitizes and ages any portrait image to simulate 20 years in the future, thus an an older version of yourself. The site uses clever tactics such as applying the software to age celebrities to attract more users.

"Users flock to such sites," stated Brent Kane who is a former technology officer and worked as a interactive media liaison in Canada, Australia and the United States. "They heavily advertise these types of sites to attract as many users as possible within a short period of time," he added.

A review of the oldyourself.com website proved Kane's assertion correct. On July 24th, 2010 this author tracked the website's traffic through a Facebook widget they had integrated on the landing page of the website. The Facebook "Likes" went from just a few to just over 28,000 "Likes" in a matter of hours suggesting the advertising load was extremely high. Interestingly enough, there was no defined page to be found on Facebook itself.

"Users who download these tool bars are completely oblivious to the fact that they are being tracked and traced regardless of what is said in the license agreements," said Kane.

Emails were sent to Mindspark to clarify their position regarding these assertions, however responses were never received. "The goals of such well invested websites appear quite innocent and entertaining to the average user, however behind the scenes, images are tracked, stored and logged into massive data mining projects specifically for private information such as email and IP addresses for future use," concluded Kane.

FACEinHOLE uses similar methods to entice users to upload photos of themselves for integration into specific scenarios. Want to look like a bodybuilder, model or actor? Faceinhole.com has thousands of scenarios to attract unsuspecting users to submit their personal photos. Registrants use an upload interface (instead of a browser intergrated toolbar) to submit their photos.

FACEinHOLE makes their domain information private to avoid public disclosure. However, seeing this domain contact owns over 5000 domain names, it is likely a large company whose reasons for such privacy raise suspicion. Their "Terms of Use" page states they are owned by LisbonLabs, Creative Experiences a corporation based in Lisbon, Portugal, but how this company is connected to the domain contact who owns 5000 other domain names is not clear.

In a typical fashion that resembles the other examples above, the site outlines a "terms of use" agreement stating that "FACEinHOLE may collect certain personal information from user that is not displayed on the FACEinHOLE Sites," and they again invade a user's privacy by stating that they "may use your personally identifiable information to present offers to you on behalf of business partners and advertisers." Also, your information can be "accessed and disclosed if and as required by legal procedures, as determined by FACEinHOLE.com in good faith. Lastly, they may "transfer personally identifiable information in the event of a transfer of ownership of FACEinHOLE.com or any of its websites or products." So basically, you have no privacy and they can do as they please with your personal images and information.

Ironically, on their legal note page, they state "FACEinHOLE.com will investigate notices of copyright infringement and take appropriate actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Well this author would be very curious to inquire if FACEinHOLE requested permission from George Bush, Tony Blair, Leonardo Dicaprio and Zinedine Zidane before duplicating and storing digital images of these figures in their media page.

Video games are other effective gateways that corporations are using to biometrically record younger generations. Want a whole generation of teens to be scanned? Why not incorporate facial recognition and biometrics in video games. That's exactly what both Xbox and Playstation have done.

Microsoft’s Project Natal is delivering a new addon to the XBox gaming system that maps the exacts position of your hands, your fingers, your feet, your face, your nose, everything in a 3D map. It recognizes voice and faces and supports complex video chat for a complete interactive experience. Maybe too interactive, because in an Orwellian overstep, Microsoft has included face recognition technology which will allow you to use the meat, sinew and cartilage on the front of your head too as your password to log in to your Live account.

Natal isn’t just for gaming: As Microsoft starts to push the Xbox 360 as the home entertainment mega-hub, you’ll be able to use Natal to flick through your films and songs and use voice recognition to issue commands.

Sony Europe's Head of Developer Services, Kish Hirani, said the Playstation Eye will have the ability to "detect gender and even the age of the face, separate facial features such as the nose, eyes and ears, and even detect whether you're smiling or not."

And taking a page from Microsoft's Natal platform, Hirani said the Eye will also support "skeleton tracking."

Of course millions of teens and young adults will jump at the chance of owning and scanning every segment of their body to play the next generation of video games. Unfortunately, once the images are uploaded online, their identities will forever be owned by nefarious levels of government.

Trust is a Wonderful Thing Until It's Broken

"A digital divide exits between how youth perceive network privacy and how the older generation of managers and executives perceive it," says Dr. Levin, co-author of the study, The Next Digital Divide: Online Social Network Privacy. "Young people believe that information shared with their personal social networks is considered private as long as its dissemination is limited to their social network. Organizations, on the other hand, don't recognize this notion of network privacy. They believe that any information posted online is public and deserves no protection."

The study found that while online social networkers are comfortable posting large amounts of personal and private information, they do so differentiating between destinations for that information. Friends, family and work are three separate networks in their minds. Young people are concerned that their personal information while freely shared within their network of friends may end up in the hands of others.

Indeed, facial recognition technology is being utilized on the internet as we speak, however to what extent is still not clear. The use of facial recognition in public places like airports depends on widespread video monitoring, an intrusive form of surveillance that can record in graphic detail personal and private behavior. And experience tells us that video monitoring will be misused. Video camera systems are operated by humans, after all, who bring to the job all their existing prejudices and biases. In Great Britain, for example, which has experimented with the widespread installation of closed circuit video cameras in public places, camera operators have been found to focus disproportionately on people of color, and the mostly male operators frequently focus voyeuristically on women.

An ACLU special report highlighted an investigation by the Detroit Free Press which showed the kind of abuses that can happen when police use video surveillance. Looking at how a database available to Michigan law enforcement was used, the newspaper found that officers had used it to help their friends or themselves stalk women, threaten motorists, track estranged spouses - even to intimidate political opponents. The unavoidable truth is that the more people who have access to a database, the more likely that there will be abuse.

Facial recognition is especially subject to abuse because it can be used in a passive way that doesn't require the knowledge, consent, or participation of the subject. It's possible to put a camera up anywhere and train it on people; modern cameras can easily view faces from over 100 yards away. People act differently when they are being watched, and have the right to know if their movements and identities are being captured.

Two things must be understood by mass populations before any further cooperation in facial recognition technology. The first is to validate if the technology is effective for its intended purpose. The second is whether the technology violates the appropriate balance between security and liberty. Unfortunately, facial recognition fails on both counts: because it doesn't work reliably, it won't significantly protect our security - but it would pose a significant threat to our privacy.

So why should the public continue to participate or subject themselves to such invasive technologies? They shouldn't. Stop uploading, stop sharing, stop scanning, stop distributing personal images throughout the internet. They are being used against us and any further compliance in this charade will only lead to new levels of manipulation and control by the powers that be.

If we keep our images personal and inaccessible to others, and if we prevent any part of our bodies from being scanned, the chances of exposing our unique biometrics will be dramatically reduced. It's already too easy for them....don't make it easier!

Kelley Bergman is a media consultant, critic and geopolitical investigator. She has worked as a journalist and writer, specializing in geostrategic issues around the globe.

Yes, I love RT and trust them a whole lot more than any mainstream media in the US and Britain in particular. They are soooo known for their lies and manipulation, and contempt for common people, and especially their hate campaign against Russia. I guess things aren't going too well with the American Corporate and English Corporate/Aristocratic decievers and all the illegal laws they are trying to sneak past people if not already trying to enforce them. It isn't as easy as they thought it would be, not with the internet still being more open than they wanted and people globally calling them on their nastiness. They should be worried. What a bunch of wooses!!!! Everyone is laughing at them and they don't get it!

RT at infowar with UK? Damning report submitted to British parliament

RT at infowar with UK? Damning report submitted to British parliament

British security experts claim that Russia is using RT to engage in information warfare against the UK and West in general by covering stories and airing political opinions overlooked by mainstream Western media.

The report submitted to the British parliament and published last week was penned by Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Institute for Statecraft in London and former NATO press officer, and Jonathan Eyal, who is International Director for the Royal United Services Institute, an influential security think tank with close ties to the British aristocratic establishment and the Ministry of Defense.

The authors say that RT and the Sputnik news agency are influencing the political discourse in the UK in a negative way on matters like Scottish independence,a potential EU exit and the Trident nuclear program. This is done by giving too much airtime to people, who are not supporting the British government’s position on those issues, or, as the report describes it, “airbrushing reality”.

“Objective reality – the actual relationship between majority and minority, mainstream and fringe – is systematically replaced by a pseudo-reality in which minorities who echo the Kremlin's strategic priorities are presented as the majority, and the genuine majority is presented as a fringe, if it is presented at all,” the report states, apparently implying that non-mainstream minority opinions are not worthy of reporting.

The experts went on to say that when Moscow voices its concerns over things like NATO’s enlargement towards Russia’s borders, the roles played by Western nations in crises in Ukraine and Syria, or the tension caused by EU’s open door policy towards asylum seekers, it is using “fundamentally, if not irretrievably flawed” arguments.

“It would be wrong to dismiss these efforts as another self-defeating attempt by a declining power to cause mischief. For the mischief which Russia’s propaganda machine can create remains substantial, and it has already scored some notable results,” the report warned.

RT has been targeted by many Western politicians, who have labeled it a “propaganda bullhorn”, to quote US Secretary of State John Kerry. The perceived threat posed by Russia has become a convenient way to defend one’s policies, for example for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin “would most love to see Britain leave the EU.”

The argument was debated by several commentators, who said that the West should learn to live in a world, where it cannot control the narrative as well as it used to.

“Freedom of speech and freedom of the press is obviously an imminent danger to NATO, EU and the home of government sponsored news, the United Kingdom,” Willy Wimmer, former State Secretary in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defense, told RT.

“The United Kingdom spends every year hundreds of millions of British pounds to finance the British tool of influencing world opinion, the BBC. In modern times we all know where it leads to,” he added. “Since the illegal wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, they hammered for war, bloodshed and hostility as they did throughout their existence.”

“Russian news services are part of our European reality. Because of their pure existence, we have plurality in our public debates and plurality is the center piece of democracy, which is ruined today by the mainstream press in Western countries and the ruling forces,” he argued.

Commenting on the report, Sergey Zheleznyak, the deputy head of the State Duma and a member of the Duma’s Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, told RT that “the ever growing audience of RT and Sputnik demonstrates that the Europeans and the British want to get this unbiased information [presented by the Russian media].”

Addressing the issue of alleged disproportionate coverage of certain politicians and experts by RT and Sputnik, Zheleznyak stressed that this problem is rooted in the fact that by no means all British politicians, particularly pro-US and pro-European ones, are ready to present their position to the Russian media, thus limiting the journalists’ options in “working with those experts and speakers that are ready to cooperate.”

Aleksandr Romanovich, the deputy head of the State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, denounced the report as “unjust” and said that it is part of a political game of the British authorities.

“I regard this report as another instance in a series of provocative actions,” he told RT adding that “it is them [the Western countries] who declared an information war.”

Both Russian media and Russian politicians have never set a goal of changing a political regime in any other country, Andrey Klimov, a member of Russia’s Federation Council, told RT.

“The Russian Federation does not export ideology or revolution ... in any form. This is one of the founding principles of the Russian foreign policy,” he said.

The accusations that RT is meddling in Britain’s internal affairs are “stunningly impudent” coming from British authors, said Gilbert Doctorow from the American Committee for East-West Accord.

“If it were true, that would merely be a mirror image of what the UK and the US governments have been doing to foment regime change in Russia these past fifteen years directly through their diplomats' dealings with opposition personalities and indirectly through the mainstream media which is hand fed by the UK and US governments,” he said.

“It is highly improbable that the Kremlin has stirred up these muddy waters in the UK,” he added.

“Allocation of responsibility using the principle of cui bono here is irrelevant when you consider the breadth and depth of the forces in UK society that are engaged on both sides of all three issues highlighted by the authors of this report."

“No television media outlet is perfect just like no politician is perfect, but I certainly appreciate the new perspective that RT brings to us in the UK,” agreed British MP Daniel Kawczynski.

“Along with other Conservative MPs, I have had long standing profound concerns about the impartiality of the BBC. These concerns are exacerbated by many examples of highly inaccurate reporting by this organization,” he added. “I am only grateful we are now entering an era where we all have the opportunity of tuning in to a wider range of news channels in order for us as individual citizens to make up our own minds.”

The report’s authors’ positions in judging RT’s intention and professional integrity were questioned by John Laughland from the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation.

“Neither Nimmo nor Eyal has any independent professional background outside the military organizations for which they work. In spite of his claims to have worked as a journalist, Nimmo has no detectable journalistic portfolio; Eyal has spent over 20 years at RUSI after a very brief academic career and he has no independent or authoritative books to his name apart from RUSI publications,” he wrote in an op-ed for RT.

“Instead, both authors have in the past misjudged and misrepresented the actions of the Russian state, such as when in March 2015 Ben Nimmo argued that Russia was about the invade the Baltics.”

Former UK Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, believes that the presence and influence of the mainstream media is way too strong to claim that RT is engaged in information warfare against the West.

“The two authors do RT too much honor. If RT does manage to restore some much-needed balance to visual media coverage of issues like the Brexit, immigration and Syria, that balance is still weighed down mightily in the supine mainstream media with the viewpoints favoured by the Washington, London and Brussels establishments. Moreover RT, unlike the mainstream media, is not afraid to report on criticism of itself for bias.”

Reddit was co-founded by Aaron Swartz a computer and mathamatical genius who was mentally tortured by the US government with threats of 35 years in prison for hacking into a University data base even when they dropped all charges. The American governement made him an example to threaten all hackers who didn't fall in line with the NSA. Well, many hackers don't and we are talking globally. The American gov pursued Aaron anyway until he finally committed suicide because he didn't want his parents to lose any more money in court over him. Aaron had already lost a million he had earned because of his computer genius. The Corporate American and Aristocratic English governments are no lovers of people. They only want power over them and don't care what it takes to get it. People wake up!!!

Read between the lines: Reddit indicates it has received classified requests for user data

Published time: 1 Apr, 2016 22:46

Reddit’s annual transparency report was a bit different this year, leaving out one important thing – whether or not the online community’s users’ privacy was affected by classified requests from the US government.

Each year Reddit releases a transparency report covering the prior year, and in last year’s report on 2014, there was a “warrant canary” section included. This year’s 2015 report, however, left it out.

A warrant canary is when a company – often communications providers such as Apple – informs its users that they have not received law enforcement requests of a classified nature.

“As of January 29, 2015, Reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed,” Reddit’s 2014 transparency report said in part.

A warrant canary is much like a canary in a coal mine – it’s useful when it’s there, but if it’s missing or silent, something is wrong. In Reddit’s 2015 transparency report, there was no mention of whether or not they had received a National Security Letter or other classified requests for user information.

Reddit is not the only company that seeks to inform its users of national security investigations, and they are not the only ones to “feel icky about it,” as Huffman put it.

Reddit has joined Twitter, WordPress and WikiMedia in an ongoing lawsuit against the US Attorney General’s office, defending their First Amendment right to publish transparency reports with the “actual aggregate number of [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] orders received,” according to the lawsuit.

UK Home Secretary Theresa May has been accused of trying to introduce state censorship of TV broadcasters by a senior Conservative minister in a leaked letter.

Former Culture Secretary Sajid Javid wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron in March to express his opposition to May’s proposal to give British broadcast regulator Ofcom new censorship powers.

Javid, who was appointed Business Secretary after the election, said the Home Secretary’s plans represented a threat to freedom of speech in the UK.

May proposed to give Ofcom the power to vet television shows before they are broadcast, a plan Javid expressed strong opposition to.

The contentious scheme was part of her extremism strategy ‘A Stronger Britain’, a policy which was prevented from being published before the election due to resistance from other senior Conservative cabinet ministers and the Liberal Democrats.

It is unknown whether May’s proposal to screen “pre-transmission” broadcasts made it into the final version of the strategy, the Guardian said on Thursday.

However, Downing Street said it will include measures to “strengthen the role of Ofcom to take action against channels which broadcast extremist content” in the Queen’s Speech, Cameron’s opening address to the new Parliament, next week.

In a frank letter to the PM dated March 11, Javid wrote: “Extending Ofcom’s powers to enable it to take pre-emptive action would move it from its current position as a post-transmission regulator into the role of censor.”----

“This would involve a fundamental shift in the way UK broadcasting is regulated, away from the current framework which is designed to take appropriate account of the right to freedom of expression.”

Javid said the government must balance its responsibility to defend society with its duty to protect freedom of expression.

In a particularly biting remark, the former culture secretary said, “It should be noted that other countries with a pre-transmission regulatory regime are not known for their compliance with rights relating to freedom of expression and Government may not wish to be associated with such regimes.”

Javid also expressed concern about the “difficulty of defining extremism and the consequent likelihood of the Government being seen to be interfering with freedom of speech without sufficient justification.”-------------

The leaked letter, which was seen by the Guardian, will bolster opposition to government policies critics describe as authoritarian.

Shortly after gaining a majority in the election on May 7, Cameron pledged to give police new powers to prevent “harmful activities” of individuals who pose a “threat to the functioning of democracy.”

The new orders were originally blocked by the Liberal Democrats during the Coalition.

The Scottish National Party (SNP), now the third-largest party in the Commons, indicated it would block any attempt to resurrect the Draft Communications Bill dubbed the Snoopers’ Charter.

The Snoopers’ Charter would pave the way for internet and mobile phone firms to retain records of customers’ online browsing habits, use of social media, emails, text messaging and voice calls.

Speaking to the Telegraph last week, one SNP MP said: “We think the mass collection of data is wrong. There is a line beyond which it is unacceptable for civil liberties can be impinged.”

Dr. Neruda: “There are people who censor and control information everywhere—in the media, the government, the military, the sciences, education, religion… everywhere. The hierarchy has a complete army of censors. The vast majority don’t know who they really work for, they’re just enforcing what they’ve been hired to enforce. It’s just a job. But technology platforms exist primarily for censorship. Intelligence gathering enables NSA censorship and information control. It’s their job to filter, control and manipulate information. The system of mass surveillance isn’t deployed to protect the masses; it’s to control them, to keep them inside the prison—from Anu’s perspective, and controllable—from the elite perspective.”

Sarah: “You’re not saying that the NSA cares about things like this, are you?”

Dr. Neruda: “Not in the sense of how god is defined, but it’s through their surveillance platforms that those in the hierarchy are alerted to information that details critical aspects of their hologram of deception. That kind of information is fed upstream to those who do care.”

Sarah: “If that’s the case, then whenever this gets released, it’ll get censored, so what’s the point?”

Dr. Neruda: “This is all about timing. If this gets released it will be because the WingMakers have confidence that it will pass censorship. Something will have happened to enable it.”

Fifth Neruda Interview

What happened is the first human attained conscious Sovereign Integral status. This Fifth Interview is from 1998. The Camelot Interview 2008 states that it was done. Kerry Cassisdy in the 2008 Camelot Interview asked James who it was he didn't give her a direct answer...and now it is a handful since 1998... things are looking up! ;?}

Thus, breath is the link, and Quantum Pause enables this link to be nurtured,expanded, strengthened, and made stable.It is also important to understand that everything I bring forward for anindividual’s consideration should be treated as a framework, not a prescriptivetechnique that should be followed rigidly. Individuals need to take responsibilityfor establishing their own exploratory techniques, methods of expansion, andnew behaviors of disentangling from the HMS. Quantum Pause is a framework,not a specific system. With the web (an analogue of the Genetic Mind), thereare ways to share your adjustments, add-ons, alterations, and new techniques,and I would encourage people to do this.

Camelot Interview, p.61

I find it interesting about the web being an analogue of the Genetic Mind since the Genetic Mind was left open by Anu so that he could make "adjustments" through the eons to keep us ignorant about who and what we really are. What he didn't count on was the "corrections" made by benevolent Interdimensional beings and the WingMakers (who were never beholden to Anu), who took advantage of this backdoor, planting many seeds that have culminated in growth since. The unconscious mind is what all of humanity has access too and is what unifies them in separation. Source Intelligence is what unifies Sovereign Integrals as One in First Source. There have been a few redirects placed in the system. The web is open and that gate is closed behind the Elite, for how busy they are with infighting and posturing. The Incunabula must realize by now that Anu is not returning so their purpose now must be in question. They must be nervous with such a large population to contend with, 7+ billion. That was something else they didn't count on.They ain't seen the kind of hackers or programmers that can match Marduke if not surpass him and I ain't taking about Anonymous either....or... hey!... maybe I am on a whole other level and scale!

Dr. Neruda: “There are people who censor and control information everywhere—in the media, the government, the military, the sciences, education, religion… everywhere. The hierarchy has a complete army of censors. The vast majority don’t know who they really work for, they’re just enforcing what they’ve been hired to enforce. It’s just a job. But technology platforms exist primarily for censorship. Intelligence gathering enables NSA censorship and information control. It’s their job to filter, control and manipulate information. The system of mass surveillance isn’t deployed to protect the masses; it’s to control them, to keep them inside the prison—from Anu’s perspective, and controllable—from the elite perspective.”

Sarah: “You’re not saying that the NSA cares about things like this, are you?”

Dr. Neruda: “Not in the sense of how god is defined, but it’s through their surveillance platforms that those in the hierarchy are alerted to information that details critical aspects of their hologram of deception. That kind of information is fed upstream to those who do care.”

Sarah: “If that’s the case, then whenever this gets released, it’ll get censored, so what’s the point?”

Dr. Neruda: “This is all about timing. If this gets released it will be because the WingMakers have confidence that it will pass censorship. Something will have happened to enable it.”

Fifth Neruda Interview

This is from a book by Luke Harding called 'The Snowden Files' he depicts the depth of how much we are surveilled globally and how extremely brave and brilliant Snowden is for bringing this to our awareness. It coincides nicely with the above excerpt from the Fifth Neruda Interview. The GCHQ in Britain is even worse than the US for spying if you can imagine and unfortunately the people there do not have a Constitution like the Americans do that still can protect them, if enough wake up. In Britain the government runs roughshod over the people doing pretty well whatever they want and a good deal of the tax payers money in Britain goes to the US to pay for the extreme surveillance used all over the world via optic cables from the East coast of the US across the Atlantic to Britain. Just like a good deal of the US taxpayers money goes to support the nefarious activities of the NSA and its minions, the FBI, CIA, and whatever other agencies. The book only 232 pages long and very well written.

Quote:

The top-secret PRISM program allows the US intelligence community to gain access to a large amount of digital information – emails, Facebook posts and instant messages. The rationale is that PRISM is needed to track foreign terrorists living outside the US. The data-collection program does not apparently require individual warrants. Rather, federal judges give their broad approval to PRISM under the FISA. By the time Snowden revealed PRISM, at least nine technology companies were on board. (The slides show Dropbox was slated to join; Twitter was missing.)

The most bitter and contentious question is how the NSA accesses this personal data. The key slide claims the data is collected ‘directly from the servers’ of the nine ‘US service providers’, Google, Yahoo and the rest.

Speaking in Hong Kong, Snowden was adamant this ‘direct access’ was indeed how PRISM worked. He told Greenwald: ‘The US government co-opts US corporate power to its own ends. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all get together with the NSA. [They] provide the NSA direct access to the backends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. They give [the] NSA direct access, so that they don’t need to oversee, so they can’t be held liable for it.’

The leaked PRISM documents come from a training manual for NSA staff. It sets out several steps. First, a complex ‘tasking’ process. Analysts use or ‘task’ PRISM to find a new surveillance target. Next, a supervisor reviews the analyst’s search terms, known as selectors. After that the supervisor then has to agree with the analyst’s ‘reasonable belief’ the target lives outside the US. (This bar is pretty low, and defined as ‘51 per cent confidence’.)

Once the target has been agreed, PRISM gets to work. Sophisticated FBI equipment at the tech companies extracts matching information. The FBI has its own database to weed out – or ‘research and validate’, as the slide puts it – US persons whose data may have been sucked up by mistake. (This system, however, isn’t foolproof.) The FBI then gives this data to the NSA. An array of NSA analytical tools processes it. These include MARINA, which sifts and stores internet records, MAINWAY for call records, PINWALE which does video, and NUCLEON, voice.

Another slide says that the NSA has ‘real-time reporting capability’. In other words, the agency is notified each time a target sends an email, writes a text, begins a chat, or even fires up their computer.

Snowden’s slide gives some sense of just how important PRISM has become to US intelligence efforts. As of 5 April 2013, the US had 117,675 active surveillance targets in its PRISM database. According to the Washington Post, much PRISM-derived intelligence ends up on President Obama’s desk; it accounts for one in seven intelligence reports. British spies get to read it too.

The training manual gives the impression that Silicon Valley is actively collaborating with the NSA, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The corporate logos of all of nine tech companies appear on the top of each PRISM slide. Jobs’s Apple is among them. The logos look like shiny, colourful butterflies.

Snowden says it was his concerns over PRISM that pushed him towards whistleblowing. It was one of the first documents he leaked to Greenwald and Poitras. But PRISM was only one important element in a troubling picture. Over the last decade the US had been secretly working to gather practically all communications entering and leaving the US.

The NSA’s original mission was to collect foreign intelligence. But it appears to have drifted away from its original goal, like a vast supertanker floating away from its anchor. It is now sucking in a lot of domestic communications. In this new era of Big Data, the agency moved from the specific to the general; from foreign targeting to what Snowden called ‘omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance’.

The agency’s other big operation, its highly sensitive cable-tapping program, ran parallel to GCHQ’S British TEMPORA project and was codenamed UPSTREAM. It gives the NSA direct access to the fibre-optic cables carrying internet and telephone data into, out of and around the US.

UPSTREAM is explained in one slide ‘as the collection of communications on fibre cables and infrastructure as data flows past’. The slide shows a map of the US with brown cables extending in both directions across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The diagram looks like the thick tentacles of an enormous sea creature. Seemingly, the US has international cable taps in South America, East Africa and the Indian Ocean. There are green loops around the cables. They link to a box marked UPSTREAM. Below is a second box labelled PRISM. Linking both boxes is an instruction to the agency’s data collectors: ‘You should use both.’

According to author James Bamford, citing earlier NSA whistleblower William Binney, UPSTREAM captures 80 per cent of communications. PRISM scoops up anything that UPSTREAM may have missed.

Snowden referred to UPSTREAM when he told Greenwald: ‘The NSA doesn’t limit itself to foreign intelligence. It collects all communications that transit the US. There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental US where communications can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analysed.’

Since a large amount of the world’s internet traffic travels through the US and 25 per cent of it also crosses Britain, the two spy agencies between them have the ability to hack most of the globe’s key communications. A 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general, leaked by Snowden, acknowledges this. It says: ‘The United States carries out foreign intelligence activities through a variety of means. One of the most effective means is to partner with commercial entities to obtain access to information that otherwise would not be available.’

The report refers to ‘America’s homefield advantage as the primary hub for worldwide telecommunications’. It says that the NSA currently has relationships with over ‘100 US companies’. This private sector/spy agency collaboration stretches ‘as far back as World War Two’.

Thanks to ties to two unnamed companies in particular, the NSA is able to eavesdrop on the world, or as the inspector general puts it, access ‘large volumes of foreign-to-foreign communications transiting the United States through fibre-optic cables, gateway switches and data networks’.

The US has the same ‘advantage’ when it comes to international telephone calls. Most international calls are routed through a small number of switches or ‘choke-points’ in the international telephone system, en route to their final destination. Many are in the US. The country is a ‘major crossroads for international switched telephone traffic’, the report says. It gives striking figures: of the 180 billion minutes of telephone communications in 2003, 20 per cent came from or terminated in the US, and 13 per cent transited the US. The internet numbers are bigger. In 2002 only a small fraction of international internet traffic went via non-US routes.

The NSA–telecoms partnership was highly lucrative. In return for access to 81 per cent of international telephone calls, Washington pays the private telecom giants many hundred millions of dollars a year. It is not known how much the British government pays its own domestic ‘intercept partners’, particularly the formerly state-owned BT, and Vodafone. But the sums will be similar and substantial.

Do you still use Google? Do you still trust them? They are coupled with DARPA and leading the charge for Transhumanism and are sleeping around with the NSA so that they can keep track of all the robotic clones they create and know every aspect of their lives right down to the color of their underwear. Even without Transhumanism they track you for everything. Three people can all search for the exact same thing on Google and all get different search results according to each of their personal preferences that had been tracked every time they used the net. Use Duckduckgo they don't track and are quite extensive in their search results. Ixquick is another search engine that doesn't track you but doesn't cover as extensively as Duckduckgo. There are alternatives to Google.

By the end of the last decade, the NSA’s capabilities were astonishing. The agency, backed by Britain and its other Five Eyes allies, had access to fibre-optic cables, telephone metadata and the servers of Google and Hotmail. The NSA’s analysts were the most powerful spies in human history. Snowden maintains they were able to target practically anybody, at any time, including the president.

‘The NSA and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence everywhere and by any means possible,’ he says. ‘Originally we saw this focus very narrowly targeted on foreign intelligence. Now we see it’s happening domestically. To do that the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its systems. It filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest and most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.’

Looked at as a whole, the files lend weight to Snowden’s assertion that as an NSA analyst he had super-powers.

‘While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere. Whether these communications may be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities an analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everybody. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you, to your accountant, to a federal judge, and even the president, if I had a personal email [address].’

The PRISM revelations provoked a howling response from the hi-tech denizens of San Francisco’s Bay Area. First there was bafflement, then denial, followed by anger. The Santa Clara valley, where most of the big tech firms are situated, likes to see itself as anti-government. The philosophical currents that waft through Cupertino and Palo Alto are libertarian and anti-establishment, a legacy of Silicon Valley’s roots in the hacker community. At the same time, these firms vie for government contracts, hire ex-Washington staff for the inside track and spend millions lobbying for legislation in their favour.

Clearly, the allegation that they were co-operating with America’s most powerful spy agency was a corporate disaster, as well as being an affront to the Valley’s self-image, and to the view of the tech industry as innovative and iconoclastic. Google prided itself on its mission statement ‘Don’t be evil’; Apple used the Jobsian imperative ‘Think Different’; Microsoft had the motto ‘Your privacy is our priority’. These corporate slogans now seemed to rebound upon their originators with mocking laughter.

Before the Guardian published the PRISM story the paper’s US business reporter, Dominic Rushe, went through his contacts book. He called Sarah Steinberg, a former Obama administration official, and now Facebook’s PR, as well as Steve Dowling, the head of PR at Apple. He rang Microsoft, PalTalk and the others. All denied any voluntary collaboration with the NSA.

‘There was total panic. They said they had never heard of it [PRISM],’ Rushe recalls. ‘They said they hadn’t given direct access to anybody. I was totally bombarded with telephone calls from increasingly senior tech executives who had more questions than answers.’

The tech companies said that they only released information to the NSA in response to a specific court order. There were no blanket policies, they said. Facebook revealed that in the last six months of 2012 it gave the personal data of between 18,000 and 19,000 users to various US law-enforcement bodies, not just to the NSA but also to the FBI, federal agencies and local police.

Several of the companies stressed they had mounted legal challenges in the FISA courts to try and say more about secret government requests for information. Google insisted: ‘We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems.’ Google’s chief architect Yonatan Zunger remarked: ‘We didn’t fight the cold war just so we could rebuild the Stasi ourselves.’ Yahoo said it had fought a two-year battle for greater disclosure, and had challenged amendments to the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its efforts were thus far unsuccessful.

The NSA documents, though, look explicit. They say ‘direct access’.

Asked how he might explain the discrepancy, one Google executive called it a ‘conundrum’. He dismissed the PRISM slides as a piece of flimsy ‘internal marketing’. He added: ‘There is no back-door way of giving data to the NSA. It’s all through the front door. They send us court orders. We are obliged by law to follow them

The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos

by Lee Fang

SOFT ROBOTS THAT can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

Yet among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant.

In-Q-Tel’s investment process. Screen grab from In-Q-Tel’s website.

Those four firms, which provide unique tools to mine data from platforms such as Twitter, presented at a February “CEO Summit” in San Jose sponsored by the fund, along with other In-Q-Tel portfolio companies.

The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media. Last September, David Cohen, the CIA’s second-highest ranking official, spoke at length at Cornell University about a litany of challenges stemming from the new media landscape. The Islamic State’s “sophisticated use of Twitter and other social media platforms is a perfect example of the malign use of these technologies,” he said.

Social media also offers a wealth of potential intelligence; Cohen noted that Twitter messages from the Islamic State, sometimes called ISIL, have provided useful information. “ISIL’s tweets and other social media messages publicizing their activities often produce information that, especially in the aggregate, provides real intelligence value,” he said.

The latest round of In-Q-Tel investments comes as the CIA has revamped its outreach to Silicon Valley, establishing a new wing, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which is tasked with developing and deploying cutting-edge solutions by directly engaging the private sector. The directorate is working closely with In-Q-Tel to integrate the latest technology into agency-wide intelligence capabilities.

Dataminr directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to spot trends and detect emerging threats.Screen grab from Dataminr’s website.

Dataminr directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to visualize and quickly spot trends on behalf of law enforcement agencies and hedge funds, among other clients.

Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments.

PATHAR’s product, Dunami, is used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “mine Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media to determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization,” according to an investigation by Reveal.

TransVoyant, founded by former Lockheed Martin Vice President Dennis Groseclose, provides a similar service by analyzing multiple data points for so-called decision-makers. The firm touts its ability to monitor Twitter to spot “gang incidents” and threats to journalists. A team from TransVoyant has worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan to integrate data from satellites, radar, reconnaissance aircraft, and drones.

Dataminr, Geofeedia, and PATHAR did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Heather Crotty, the director of marketing at TransVoyant, acknowledged an investment from In-Q-Tel, but could not discuss the scope of the relationship. In-Q-Tel “does not disclose the financial terms of its investments,” Crotty said.

Carrie A. Sessine, the vice president for external affairs at In-Q-Tel, also declined an interview because the fund “does not participate in media interviews or opportunities.”

Over the last decade, In-Q-Tel has made a number of public investments in companies that specialize in scanning large sets of online data. In 2009, the fund partnered with Visible Technologies, which specializes in reputation management over the internet by identifying the influence of “positive” and “negative” authors on a range of platforms for a given subject. And six years ago, In-Q-Tel formed partnerships with NetBase, another social media analysis firm that touts its ability to scan “billions of sources in public and private online information,” and Recorded Future, a firm that monitors the web to predict events in the future.

Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, noted in a 2012 paper that “monitoring social media” is increasingly essential for government agencies seeking to keep track of “erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends.”

The recent wave of investments in social media-related companies suggests the CIA has accelerated the drive to make collection of user-generated online data a priority. Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to connect the dots in large sets of data.

In February, Lab41 published an article exploring the ways in which a Twitter user’s location could be predicted with a degree of certainty through the location of the user’s friends. On Github, an open source website for developers, Lab41 currently has a project to ascertain the “feasibility of using architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks to classify the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of Twitter messages towards a specific topic.”

Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.

Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a “tech unicorn” — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.

Yet other In-Q-Tel-backed companies are now openly embracing the practice. Geofeedia, for instance, promotes its research into Greenpeace activists, student demonstrations, minimum wage advocates, and other political movements. Police departments in Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and other major municipalities have contracted with Geofeedia, as well as private firms such as the Mall of America and McDonald’s.

Lee Guthman, an executive at Geofeedia, told reporter John Knefel that his company could predict the potential for violence at Black Lives Matter protests just by using the location and sentiment of tweets. Guthman said the technology could gauge sentiment by attaching “positive and negative points” to certain phrases, while measuring “proximity of words to certain words.”

Privacy advocates, however, have expressed concern about these sorts of automated judgments.

“When you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion,” said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

She added that there is a dangerous trend toward government relying on tech companies to “build massive dossiers on people” using “nothing but constitutionally protected speech.”

The London-based group Privacy International obtained the previously confidential files as part of an ongoing legal case challenging the scope of British spies’ covert collection of huge troves of private data.

Millie Graham Wood, legal officer at Privacy International, said in a statement Wednesday that the documents show “the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data. This can be anything from your private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities.”

She added: “The agencies themselves admit that the majority of data collected relates to individuals who are not a threat to national security or suspected of a crime. This highly sensitive information about us is vulnerable to attack from hackers, foreign governments, and criminals.”

The documents, published online Wednesday, primarily relate to the opaque rules regulating British spy agencies’ use of so-called bulk personal data sets, which are obtained without any judicial authorization and contain “personal data about a wide range of individuals, the majority of whom are not of direct intelligence interest,” according to the agencies’ own definition of them.

The documents include internal guidance codes for spies who have access to the surveillance systems. One memo, dated June 2014, warns employees of MI6, the U.K.’s equivalent of the CIA, against performing a “self-search” for data on themselves, offering a bizarre example that serves to illustrate the scope of what some of the repositories contain.

“An example of an inappropriate ‘self search’ would be to use the database to remind yourself where you have traveled so you can update your records,” the memo says. “This is not a proportionate use of the system, as you could find this information by another means (i.e. check the stamps in your passport or keep a running record of your travel) that would avoid collateral intrusion into other people’s data.”

Another document warns MI6’s employees that they must not trawl the surveillance databases “for information about other members of staff, neighbors, friends, acquaintances, family members and public figures.” That is, it adds, “unless it is necessary to do so as part of your official duties.” The agency says that it has monitoring systems in place to catch any abuses, but it is unclear whether the checks that are in place are sufficient. One 2010 policy paper from MI6 states there is “no external oversight” of it or its partners’ “bulk data operations,” though the paper adds that this was subject to review.

Elsewhere in the documents, eavesdropping agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and domestic intelligence agency MI5 admit that they have obtained the bulk data sets on several occasions dating back more than a decade — GCHQ beginning in 1998, and MI5 in 2005 — under Section 94 of the 1984 Telecommunications Act. The agencies argue that the data has thwarted terror plots and is needed “to identify subjects of interest, or unknown individuals who surface in the course of investigations; to establish links between individuals and groups, or otherwise improve understanding of a target’s behavior and connections; to validate intelligence obtained through other sources; or to ensure the security of operations or staff.”

Last year, The Intercept exposed how GCHQ has in recent years attempted to create what it described as the world’s largest surveillance system, covertly harvesting in excess of 50 billion records every day about people’s emails, phone calls, and web browsing habits. In one program code-named KARMA POLICE, the agency said it was seeking to obtain “a web browsing profile for every visible user on the internet.”

Smarmy Google outright lies about their connection to the White House and this article doesn't even talk about DARPA and Google's Transhumanist agenda. Something is happening right now, a shift of some sort, that is rallying the masses to truly see how much they have been bamboozled with lie after lie after lie from governments and especially their bed partners big corporations. It does not bode well for either. Who said the people didn't want to know the truth? It wasn't the people.

The Android Administration

Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts

When President Obama announced his support last week for a Federal Communications Commission plan to open the market for cable set-top boxes — a big win for consumers, but also for Google — the cable and telecommunications giants who used to have a near-stranglehold on tech policy were furious. AT&T chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi lashed out at what he called White House intervention on behalf of “the Google proposal.”

He’s hardly the first to suggest that the Obama administration has become too close to the Silicon Valley juggernaut.

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.

Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.

It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington.

The Intercept teamed up with Campaign for Accountability to present two revealing data sets from that forthcoming project: one on the number of White House meetings attended by Google representatives, and the second on the revolving door between Google and the government.

As the interactive charts accompanying this article show, Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.

No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen. (The accompanying chart reflects 94 Shelton visits; it excludes large gatherings such as state dinners and White House tours.)

The information, Weismann said, “will help the public learn more about the company’s influence on our government, our policies, and our lives.”

Asked to respond, Google spokesperson Riva Litman referred The Intercept to a blog post written when the Wall Street Journal raised similar questions a year ago. In that post, Google said the meetings covered a host of topics, including patent reform, STEM education, internet censorship, cloud computing, trade and investment, and smart contact lenses. The company also claimed to have counted similar numbers of visits to the White House by Microsoft and Comcast — but it did not explain its methodology for parsing the data.

Google’s dramatic rise as a lobbying force has not gone unnoticed. The company paid almost no attention to the Washington influence game prior to 2007, but ramped up steeply thereafter. It spent $16.7 million in lobbying in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has been at or near the top of public companies in lobbying expenses since 2012.

But direct expenditures on lobbying represent only one part of the larger influence-peddling game. Google’s lobbying strategy also includes throwing lavish D.C. parties; making grants to trade groups, advocacy organizations, and think tanks; offering free services and training to campaigns, congressional offices, and journalists; and using academics as validators for the company’s public policy positions. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was an enthusiastic supporter of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns and has been a major Democratic donor.

For its part, the Obama administration — attempting to project a brand of innovative, post-partisan problem-solving of issues that have bedeviled government for decades — has welcomed and even come to depend upon its association with one of America’s largest tech companies.

Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations in the digital era.

In just the past few years, Google has provided diplomatic assistance to the administration through expanding internet access in Cuba; collaborated with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to bring Google Fiber into public housing; used Google resources to monitor droughts in real time; and even captured 360-degree views of White House interiors.

But perhaps most salient here is the fact that modern life requires so much information technology support that a sprawling operation like the White House has turned to tech companies — often in the form of ex-Google employees — when faced with pressing IT needs.

Practically every part of the government makes available some form of technology, whether it’s the public-facing website for a federal agency, a digital mechanism for people to access benefits, or a new communications tool for espionage or war.

Somebody has to build and manage those projects, and Silicon Valley firms have the expertise needed to do that. White House officials have publicly asked Silicon Valley for aid in stopping terrorists from recruiting via social media, securing the internet of things, thwarting cyberattacks, modernizing the Defense Department, and generally updating all their technology. We can reasonably expect yet more things are being asked for behind closed doors.toddparker

The disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov in October 2013 is the most obvious example. Within weeks of the site going live, Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, his top deputy Nicole Wong (a former Google deputy general counsel), and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough held meetings with Google personnel.

In Time magazine, Steven Brill detailed one of those meetings, between Park and Gabriel Burt, the chief technology officer at Eric Schmidt’s Civis Analytics. Civis was already working on Obamacare as a vendor for Enroll America, a nonprofit tasked with getting people subscribed on the insurance exchanges. Civis used reams of data to target communities with high levels of uninsured Americans so Enroll America could contact them. But now the site where they were supposed to sign up wasn’t working. So the White House turned to Civis for help with that as well.

Eventually, Mikey Dickerson, a site-reliability engineer with Google who previously worked on the Obama campaign, got hired to fix the site. Burt and Dickerson worked together to “form a rescue squad” for HealthCare.gov, according to Time. And most of the recruits came from Google. Later, Dickerson led the U.S. Digital Service, a new agency whose mission was to fix other technology problems in the federal government. Ex-Google staffers were prevalent there as well. Dickerson attended nine White House meetings with Google personnel while working for the government between 2013 and 2014.

Meetings between Google and the White House, viewed in this context, sometimes function like calls to the IT Help Desk. Only instead of working for the same company, the government is supposed to be regulating Google as a private business, not continually asking it for favors.

Much of this collaboration could be considered public-minded — it’s hard to argue with the idea that the government should seek outside technical help when it requires it. And there’s no evidence of a quid pro quo. But this arrangement doesn’t have to result in outright corruption to be troubling.

The obvious question that arises is: Can government do its job with respect to regulating Google in the public interest if it owes the company such a debt of gratitude?

Google doesn’t think its activities present an antitrust problem. It doesn’t feel constrained from holding incredible amounts of data. But should Google be in a position to make that determination itself? How much influence is too much influence?

Another potential conflict arises from the enormous amount of data that Google and the government each have stored on American citizens. Google recently acknowledged having mined the data of student users of its education apps, and has been accused repeatedly of violating user privacy in other contexts. An overly close partnership risks Google putting its data in the government’s hands or gaining access to what the government has collected.

When the federal government and a private company share the same worldview, get the same insights from the same groups of people, the policy drift can occur with nobody explicitly choosing the direction. It just seems like the right thing to do.

And there is no doubt that Google’s rise in Washington has coincided with public policy that is friendlier to the company.

Most notably, Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to competition. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices.

In 2012, staff at the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing antitrust charges after determining that Google was engaging in anti-competitive tactics and abusing its monopoly. A staff report that was later leaked said Google’s conduct “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google’s White House visits increased right around that time. And in 2013, the presidentially appointed commissioners of the FTC overrode their staff, voting unanimously not to file any charges.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the administration “has been a huge help” to Google both by protecting it from attempts to limit its market power and by blocking privacy legislation. “Google has been able to thwart regulatory scrutiny in terms of anti-competitive practices, and has played a key role in ensuring that the United States doesn’t protect at all the privacy of its citizens and its consumers,” Chester said.

At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, citing the possibility of consumer harm, called on the FTC to reconsider the kind of antitrust charges against Google recently filed in Europe.

But Obama has argued that European regulators are being too aggressive toward Google out of a desire to protect companies that aren’t as capable. “In defense of Google and Facebook, sometimes the European response here is more commercially driven than anything else,” he told Re/code in February. “We have owned the internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it, in ways they can’t compete.”

Between January 2009 and October 2015, Google staffers gathered at the White House on 427 separate occasions. All told, 182 White House employees and 169 Google employees attended the meetings, with participation from almost every domestic policy and national security player in the West Wing.

The frequency of the meetings has increased practically every year, from 32 in 2009 to 97 in 2014. In the first 10 months of 2015, which is as far as the study goes, there were 85 Google meetings.

The most frequent visitor is Johanna Shelton, one of Google’s top lobbyists in Washington — officially its director of public policy. Shelton attended meetings at the White House on 94 different occasions.

The most Google-visited White House official is Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer from 2012 to 2014. In that short period, Park met with Google officials at the White House 22 times. Park’s replacement, current Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, was a former Google vice president. She had five White House meetings as a Google representative, then 10 Google meetings as a White House representative.

The comprehensiveness of Google’s outreach jumps out from the data. You would expect some contact between Google and top technology policymakers like Park, Smith, Aneesh Chopra, Susan Crawford, and Vivek Kundra. But Google’s presence as an economic force and a communications tool gives the company an interest in virtually every aspect of public policy.

Since 2009, Google has met with all three of Obama’s directors of the National Economic Council (Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, and Jeffrey Zients), one chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (Austan Goolsbee), and another official who would become CEA chair (Jason Furman, who was then deputy director of the NEC).

Company employees met with four Obama chiefs of staff (Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, Jack Lew, and Denis McDonough). Google also huddled with national security personnel like Michael McFaul (then at the NSC, later U.S. ambassador to Russia) and Tony Blinken (deputy national security adviser). Employees met with Heather Zichal, deputy assistant for energy and climate change, and White House science adviser John Holdren. They met with close counselors to the president like Pete Rouse, Valerie Jarrett, John Podesta, and Dan Pfeiffer. They met with then-communications director Jennifer Palmieri. And they met with the president of the United States 21 separate times — five times in the first term and 16 times in the first two-plus years of the second term. Even Jill Biden and Michelle Obama have taken meetings with Google employees.

The visitor logs only show the individuals in attendance at the meetings, not what the meetings were about. But it’s possible to make some educated guesses. The presence of Johanna Shelton at 94 meetings suggests that a significant chunk were devoted to lobbying on various Google priorities. But there are hundreds of other meetings in the logs that point to more of a consulting role.

The “revolving door” data, displayed in the above visualization, reveals 55 cases of individuals moving from positions at Google into the federal government, and 197 individuals moving from positions inside the government to jobs at Google. The data includes positions at firms that Eric Schmidt owns or controls — Civis Analytics, The Groundwork, and Tomorrow Ventures — along with two law firms and three lobbying firms that have represented Google. On the government side, staffers at Obama for America and a handful of other political campaigns were included.

The data includes individuals from Google appointed to government boards while maintaining their positions at the tech firm. Google board member John Doerr was appointed to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in February 2011. Eric Schmidt has been part of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology since 2009. He was also more recently appointed to lead the Defense Innovation Advisory Board at the Pentagon, which occurred outside the time frame of the data.

But the bulk of the moves involved job changes. Google alums work in the departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Education, Justice, and Veterans Affairs. One works at the Federal Reserve, another at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The highest number — 29 — moved from Google into the White House. The State Department had the next highest with just five. The moves from Google to government got more frequent in the later Obama years; 11 occurred in 2014 and 16 in 2015, after only 18 in the entire first term.

On the other side, former staffers from 36 different areas across the government have found a willing employer at Google since 2009. Johanna Shelton was a senior counsel on the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee. Joshua Wright, a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, rotated into a top position at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, one of the law firms that has represented Google.

Nineteen researchers and scientists at NASA, senior analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an “information assurance expert” at the National Security Agency, and 32 separate officials with the Obama for America campaign found their way to Google.

Former employees of 12 of the 15 cabinet agencies (Energy, Justice, Defense, Education, State, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, HHS, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs) now work at the tech company or its affiliates, led by 16 former Pentagon staffers. The exodus ramped up in the second term, hitting 41 in 2014, compared to just six in 2009.

Seven individuals made a full revolution through the revolving door, either going from Google to government and back again, or from government to Google and back again. This includes Julia Duncan, who left her job as White House personnel officer to go work in Google’s finance department in 2013, and a year later moved to the State Department’s Office of Food Security.

Nathan Parker, a staff software engineer at Google, did a stint in the U.S. Digital Service for four months before returning to Google HQ in Mountain View. Austin Lau was a planner and tech lead for Google India, then became a foreign service officer at the State Department before returning to Google to work on social impact partnerships.

A few individuals are listed twice: The aforementioned Mikey Dickerson moved from Google to the Obama campaign, back to Google, and then to the U.S. Digital Service, for example.

The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership.

Ex-Google staffers may not be directly involved in setting policy that affects Google, but they have access to decision-makers. They maintain ties to their former bosses. And Google employees with government experience have a network of friends and colleagues at federal agencies, House and Senate offices, the West Wing, and practically everywhere else.

Quote:

Methodology:

The chart depicting White House visits is based on meetings between White House officials and employees of Google or companies controlled by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, since President Obama took office in 2009 through October 2015. The data has been compiled from White House visitor records.

Large gatherings, such as state dinners and White House tours were excluded. Names were cross-referenced with lists of Google employees.

The jobs visualization was compiled from publicly available information including LinkedIn profiles, news sources, lobby disclosure records, and OpenSecrets.org data. Analysts gathered data by searching for profiles mentioning Google and terms related to government jobs. The data includes any job changes that occurred during Obama’s presidency, as well as moves from Obama’s campaign to Google in 2008.

Stonewalled by NSA, Members of Congress Ask Really Basic Question Again

By Dan Froomkin

A BIPARTISAN GROUP of lawmakers is none too happy that the executive branch is asking them to reauthorize two key surveillance programs next year without answering the single most important question about them.

The programs, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are called PRISM and Upstream. PRISM collects hundreds of millions of internet communications of “targeted individuals” from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype. Upstream takes communications straight from the major U.S. internet backbones run by telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon and harvests data that involves selectors related to foreign targets.

But both programs, though nominally targeted at foreigners overseas, inevitably sweep up massive amounts of data involving innocent Americans.

The question is: How much? The government won’t answer.

Fourteen members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Friday asking for at least a rough estimate.

“In order that we may properly evaluate these programs, we write to ask that you provide us with a public estimate of the number of communications or transactions involving United States persons subject to Section 702 surveillance on an annual basis,” said the letter. Signatories included ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. and a senior Republican member, James Sensenbrenner.

Sen. Ron Wyden has asked for a number since 2011; the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended in July 2014 that the government provide several. In October, more than 30 privacy groups asked for an estimate and explained how easy it would be to come up with one.

“House Judiciary Committee members have lent their voices to the growing chorus demanding hard facts about how foreign intelligence surveillance affects Americans,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, in a statement. “The NSA will soon be asking Congress to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will repeat its past claims that any collection of Americans’ communications is merely ‘incidental.’”

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Whose law is it according too? Google's? As to backdoors Google doesn't need any they just hand it all right over to the NSA since they are working with them!

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 1 guest

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum